Closed Head Injury Causes Hyperexcitability in Rat Hippocampal CA1 but not in CA3 Pyramidal Cells

Traumatic brain injury frequently elicits epileptic seizures hours or days after the impact. The mechanisms on cellular level are poorly understood. Because posttraumatic epilepsy appears in many cases as a temporal-lobe epilepsy which originated the hippocampus, we studied trauma-induced hyperexcitability on the cellular level in this brain area. We used the model of closed head injury to analyse the electrophysiological changes in CA1 and CA3 pyramidal cells and in interneurones of the CA1 field, which is extremely sensitive to ischemia. We found that morphologically closed head injury (CHI) led to a gradual progressive, cell type specific time course in neuronal degeneration. To analyse electrophysiological impairment we measured resting membrane potential, recorded spontaneous action potentials and induced action potentials by current pulses at different times after CHI. We found a dramatic increase in the frequency of spontaneous action potentials of CA1 but not of CA3 pyramidal cells after CHI. This hyperexcitability was maximal at 2 h (4.5-fold higher than sham), was also observed at 24 h after CHI and disappeared after 3 days. We found that CA1 interneurones responded by a much weaker increase of AP frequency after CHI. We conclude that the strong hyperexcitability after CHI is cell-type specific and transient. The understanding of the complex neuronal interactions probably offers a promising possibility for pharmacological intervention to prevent posttraumatic epilepsy.