Date: Wednesday, August 27
Time: 09:30-11:10
Location: Athens
Chair: Michael S. Beattie and Jacqueline C. Bresnahan (University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA)

Preclinical evaluation of treatment strategies aimed at improving outcomes after CNS injury require reliable outcome measures of neurological recovery that are relevant to human clinical trials. This symposium will examine a number of behavioral measures used to evaluate neurological recovery in animals after CNS injury, including the “BBB” locomotor scale and autonomic functional outcomes for spinal cord injury (SCI), tests for forelimb function in brain and spinal injury models in rodents, as well as forelimb tests for non-human primates, and the use of a swimming test for evaluation of recovery after rat SCI. In the final presentation, mathematical methods for evaluating the usefulness of all these measures, and their relationship to underlying mechanisms of repair and recovery will be discussed, and the development of a large database and data mining approach to improving preclinical neurological resting for CBS injury will be presented.

Program

• 09:30 Measuring a broad spectrum of clinically relevant outcomes after experimental spinal cord injury
  Jacqueline C. Bresnahan and Yvette S. Nout (University of California, San Francisco, USA)
  

• 09:50 The Schnell Swim Test (SST) to measure motor function and recovery in spinal cord injured rats
  Mirjam Gullo, Eva Hochreutener, Dina Schnell, Jeannette Scholl, Martin E. Schwab and Lisa Schnell (University of Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland) Presenting author: Lisa Schnell
  

• 10:10 Skilled Limb Use in Rat Models of Human Neurological Disease
  Gerlinde A. Metz (University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta Canada)
  

• 10:30 Measuring recovery of forelimb function after CNS injury in rodents and primates, with notes on man
  Michael S. Beattie and Karen-Amanda Irvine (University of California, San Francisco, USA)
  

• 10:50 Translational measures of behavioral function after spinal cord injury: A multivariate study of outcomes across species
  A.R. Ferguson¹, G.C. Courtine²,³, E.S. Rosenzweig⁴, D.L. Jindrich³,⁵, J.C. Gensel6, K.-A. Irvine¹, V.R. Edgerton³, M.H. Tuszynski4, J.C. Bresnahan¹, M.S. Beattie¹
  (¹University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA; ²University of Zurich, Zurich, Zwitserland; ³University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; ⁴University of California, San Diego, CA, USA; ⁵Arizona State University, AZ, USA;⁶The Ohio State University, OH, USA)
  

• 11:10 End of session

The information displayed above is preliminary and can therefore change.