ABSTRACT
Experimental models of traumatic brain injury (TBI) have been designed to mimic closely the clinical sequelae of human TBI and play a crucial role in the process of evaluating and understanding the physiologic, behavioral, and histopathologic changes associated with TBI, with a view toward developing novel treatment strategies for this devastating disease. Because human TBI is very much a heterogenous disease, no single animal model of TBI developed, to date, can mimic the whole spectrum of clinical TBI. Rather, the concurrent use of a number of distinct yet complementary models are necessary to reliably reproduce the whole range of injury severity and characteristic features observed upon clinical and postmortem examination of TBI patients. Although imperfect, experimental TBI models have contributed enormously to our insight into the posttraumatic sequelae and have prompted the development of several novel diagnostic and treatment strategies that either are now part of clinical standard practice or are under intense preclinical and clinical investigation.
