Effects of ketamine and urethane on stimulation-induced c-fos expression in neurons of cat visual cortex

The effects of ketamine and urethane on neuronal activities remain in debate. As a member of immediate early genes family, the expression of c-fos is stimulation dependent and could be treated as an index to evaluate the strength of neural activities. In this study, SABC immunohistochemical techniques were applied to compare the c-fos expression in neurons of the primary visual cortex (V1) of cats and therefore, to evaluate the effects of acute anesthesia with ketamine HCl and uethane on inhibiting neural activities. Our results showed that compared with control cats, there were no significant differences with the average densities of Nissl-stained V1 neurons in each cortical layers of either urethane or ketamine anesthetized cats. In urethane anesthetized cats, neither the average densities nor the immunoreactive intensities of c-fos positive V1 neurons showed significant difference with that of control ones. However, both the average densities and immunoreactive intensities of c-fos positive V1 neurons in ketamine anesthetized cats decreased significantly compared with that of control and urethane anesthetized cats. These results suggested that ketamine has strong inhibitory effects on the activities of visual cortical neurons, whereas urethane did not.

Keywords
Ketamine; Urethane; Primary visual cortex; Visual stimulation; c-fos protein expression