Authors

Inefta M. Reid

Type

Text

Type

Dissertation

Advisor

Solomon, Irene C | Collins, William | Wong-Riley, Margaret. | Acosta-Martinez, Maricedes

Date

2015-08-01

Keywords

Development, Hypoxia, Long-term facilitation, Neuroscience, Rat, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome | Neurosciences

Department

Department of Physiology and Biophysics.

Language

en_US

Source

This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.

Identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/11401/76752

Publisher

The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.

Format

application/pdf

Abstract

Hypoxia is a common feature of many pathologies including but not limited to asthma, spinal cord injury, chronic obstructive sleep pulmonary disease, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Even though neuromodulatory effects mediated by maturation have been widely studied in other disciplines, such efforts have been lacking in the area of respiratory control. This dissertation is motivated by questions such as how does a known change in respiratory neurotransmitters manifest differently in the modulation of known respiratory output, especially in response to moderate, mild, and sever hypoxia. Aimed at understanding the characteristics and underlying mechanisms involved maturation of the hypoxic ventilator response in neonatal rats in vivo. Although a limited number of studies have been done on newborn rodents, the mechanisms responsible for long-term and short-term variability and complexity of these dynamics within the neural network during postnatal development is not yet well-studied. Understanding the characteristics and underlying mechanisms of neural plasticity is important to the study of respiratory control during normal physiology as well as pathological disorders. In our first aim we discovered that neonatal rats exhibit a higher likelihood of gasping and the duration of gasping and number of gasp also had a maturational trend as well. Most importantly the network complexity (organization) was reduced during gasping. In the second part of our study data demonstrated that acute intermittent hypoxia (AIH) elicited respiratory long-term facilitation (LTF). However unlike the traditional response to AIH in the developing rat respiratory LTF primarily took the form of an enhancement in burst frequency, although an increase in burst amplitude was seen in some rats. Insight gained from this work will highlight that a distinct group of neurotransmitters are responsible for the varying responses to hypoxia and that they also manifest as a developmental response to exhibiting a similar behavior from the neonatal rat. | 140 pages

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