Assessing Spinal Cord Injury

Functional recovery is the ultimate goal of research into experimental therapy for spinal cord injury (SCI). The effective use of animal models of SCI requires functional assessment methods that can be reliably repeated in different laboratories. The aim of this chapter is to describe some key features of behavioural methodology which inform our laboratory’s decisions regarding appropriate assessments in rat models of SCI. These include recognition of the type of data being measured, assurance of appropriate sampling methods to improve reliability, and considerations of the animals’ motivation during completion of the behavioural tasks. We then illustrate these principles with methods used in our laboratory, a major emphasis of which has been biomechanical analysis of limb action during overground locomotion. We also describe analysis of skilled limb movements during more challenging tasks such as ladder locomotion and forelimb pellet retrieval. Our focus throughout is on objective quantitative assessment of movement that can be reliably used to assess functional capabilities in rat SCI models under different lesion or treatment conditions.