MRI Study of Hydrogen Water and Minocycline Combination Therapy for Ischemic Stroke

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ABSTRACT MRI has become a standard method to evaluate the extend of injury in the brain after stroke and possibly guide treatments. This proposal aims to: i) develop and implement novel multiparametric MRI methods to determine viability tissue status and to investigate therapeutic effects, ii) to apply these methods to evaluate the efficacy for hydrogen water, minocycline, and combination of hydrogen water and minocycline treatment in the established rat stroke model. Part one involves development of sophisticated multimodal MRI acquisition and analysis methods to longitudinally characterize and track tissue viability, cerebral functional status, and cerebral vascular reactivity, beyond infarct volume. Part two involves their applications to investigate the efficacy for hydrogen water, minocycline, and combination of hydrogen water and minocycline treatment. Hydrogen or minocycline individually has been shown to be neuroprotective in experimental ischemic stroke as well as other neurological disorders. We recently found that the combination of hydrogen water and minocycline markedly reduces MRI-defined lesion volume, gray-matter cytotoxicity, white-matter damage, and behavioral deficits in rats after transient (90-min) middle cerebral artery occlusion. Our central hypothesis is that hydrogen water treatment reduces infarct size, vascular health, and improves functional recovery as detected by MRI, and the combined hydrogen water and minocycline further results in superior efficacy.