Eric Beck

A murine model of myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury through ligation of the left anterior descending artery.

Acute or chronic myocardial infarction (MI) are cardiovascular events resulting in high morbidity and mortality. Establishing the pathological mechanisms at work during MI and developing effective therapeutic approaches requires methodology to reproducibly simulate the clinical incidence and reflect the pathophysiological changes associated with MI. Here, we describe a surgical method to induce MI in mouse models that can be used for short-term ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury as well as permanent ligation. The major advantage of this method is to facilitate location of the left anterior descending artery (LAD) to allow for accurate ligation of this artery to induce ischemia in the left ventricle of the mouse heart. Accurate positioning of the ligature on the LAD increases reproducibility of infarct size and thus produces more reliable results. Greater precision in placement of the ligature will improve the standard surgical approaches to simulate MI in mice, thus reducing the number of experimental animals necessary for statistically relevant studies and improving our understanding of the mechanisms producing cardiac dysfunction following MI. This mouse model of MI is also useful for the preclinical testing of treatments targeting myocardial damage following MI.

A Murine Model of Myocardial Ischemia–Reperfusion Injury

Ligation of the left anterior descending (LAD) coronary artery in the mouse heart is a widely used model to simulate myocardial infarction and ischemia-reperfusion injury. Here we describe a ligation technique routinely performed in our laboratory to induce myocardial infarction that may be used to study ischemia-reperfusion injury in the myocardium. The methods described enhance location of the LAD coronary artery to allow for accurate ligation, thus increasing reproducibility of infarct size and location.