An applicable method of drawing cerebrospinal fluid in rats

摘要

Background: Component analysis of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is frequently required to probe the causes and pathologic mechanisms of disease and effective drugs in experimental studies of the central nervous system. Rat and mouse are two kinds of most frequently used animals in experimental studies. Rats are considered to be the most suitable animal for experimental analysis of CSF both on cost and manipulability as mice are too small for drawing CSF. However, drawing CSF from rats is still not easy, which makes many researchers choose bigger animals, such as rabbits. This paper introduced a highly applicable technique of CSF collection from cerebellomedullary cistern (CC) in rats.