Experimental Modeling of Cranial Brain Injury in Experimental Animals

Resume. The purpose of the study is to development of an experimental setup that ensures standardization and unification during modeling of traumatic brain injury in medium- and large-sized laboratory animals. Materials and methods of research. The developed experimental setup for modeling craniocerebral trauma in medium- and large-sized animals includes a plastic guide tube, a round platform made of perforated impact-resistant plastic, an impact rod in the form of a polished metal shaft, a claw gripper, a tabletop with a through hole, a positioning system for the impact rod and a table-like fixing device. During the experiments, the anesthetized laboratory animal is fixed so that the lower plane of the positioning system touches the surface of its body, and the point of impact is in the center of the positioning ring. After this, a load of a given mass is dropped from a predetermined height. The results of the study and their analysis. Experimental studies using rabbits of the “Soviet Chinchilla” line aged 8–10 weeks and weighing about 3 kg showed that dropping a load weighing 1250 g from a height of 100 cm along a guide pipe leads to mild traumatic brain injury, and a load weighing 2000 g from a height of 150 cm leads to severe traumatic brain injury. It is shown that the use of the developed experimental setup for modeling craniocerebral trauma in experimental animals provides the ability to accurately reproduce the conditions for the formation of focal damage to the brain of experimental animals, characteristic of craniocerebral trauma, excluding additional damage to the bones of the skull and jaw, which makes it possible to use the experimental setup to study the damaging effects of mine-explosive trauma factors in the interests of developing protective equipment, diagnostic methods and treatment.