Elsevier

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 453, Issue 3, 10 April 2009, Pages 233-237
Neuroscience Letters

Age-dependent mortality in the pilocarpine model of status epilepticus

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2009.02.035Get rights and content

Abstract

Status epilepticus (SE) is an acute neurological emergency associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Age has been shown to be a critical factor in determining outcome after SE. Understanding the causes of this increased mortality with aging by developing an animal model to study this condition would play a major role in studying mechanisms to limit the mortality due to SE. Here we employed pilocarpine to induce SE in rats aged between 5 and 28 weeks. Similar to clinical studies in man, we observed that age was a significant predictor of mortality following SE. While no deaths were observed in 5-week-old animals, mortality due to SE increased progressively with age and reached 90% in 28-week-old animals. There was no correlation between the age of animals and severity of SE. With increasing age mortality occurred earlier after the onset of SE. These results indicate that pilocarpine-induced SE in the rat provides a useful model to study age-dependent SE-induced mortality and indicates the importance of using animal models to elucidate the mechanisms contributing to SE-induced mortality and the development of novel therapeutic interventions to prevent SE-induced death.

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Acknowledgements

NINDS Grants RO1NS051505 and RO1NS052529, and award UO1NS058213 from the NIH CounterACT Program through NINDS to RJD supported this study. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the federal government. We thank our research colleagues Drs. Dawn Carter and Katherine Falenski for their critical suggestions. We also thank Dr. Viswanathan Ramakrishnan for his help with the statistical analysis. We thank Elisa Attkisson for

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