Does one plus one make two? Investigation of pharmacological effects and cortical injury on the developing brain

Abstract

This thesis examined how pharmacological treatment and cortical injury during development affects brain plasticity. Rats were given either a low dose of perinatal fluoxetine or a mild postnatal day 7 Hypoxic‐Ischemic (HI) injury, both, or neither. The functional outcome was assessed using a series of behavioral tasks and anatomical measures. To assess how HI affects the development of motor maps, forelimb motor maps were evoked at P19. The findings indicate that fluoxetine treatment or HI injury mostly negatively affected functional outcome. The combined treatment with fluoxetine and HI injury only interacted on a limited number of measures. There was no delay in the emergence of evoked motor movements, or change in map location in the HI animals. These results suggest that the pharmacological treatment and cortical injury described in this thesis may have different mechanisms whereby plastic changes are induced and the interaction between these two mechanisms is limited.