Recently, a research group headed by Professor CHEN Zhong at Department of Pharmacology, Key Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology of the Ministry of Health of China and Zhejiang Province Key Laboratory of Neurobiology, College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang University has published a research paper titled ‘A novel neuroprotective strategy for ischemic stroke: transient mild acidosis treatment by CO₂ inhalation at reperfusion’ in J Cerebr Blood F Met(IF=5.398). In this paper, Prof. Chen’s group reported for the first time that acidosis treatment at reperfusion protects against cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury.

Cerebral ischemic postconditioning is a new intervention that has emerged recently as an endogenous strategy for neuroprotection . However,the clinical application of ischemic postconditionding is difficult. Therefore to seek other postproceeding treatments is particularly important. Tissue acidification is one of the most important components of ischemic postconditioning. We set out to test whether acidosis treatment at reperfusion can protect against cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury. Our results showed that 5 min of acidosis treatment at 5 min and 50 min after the onset of reperfusion induced optimal neuroprotection, as revealed by reduced infarct volume and improve neurological deficit scores at 24h of reperfusion.We further demonstrated that the acidosis treatment inhibits neuronal apoptosis both in vivo and in vitro.Taken together, these findings indicate that transient mild acidosis treatment at reperfusion protects against cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury. As a new endogenous strategy with a wider therapeutic time window, acidosis treatment has a potential clinical application value for neuroprotection.

Co-first authors of this article are Ph.D students Fan Yanying and Shen Zhe.Thiswork was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81030061, 81273506) ,the National Basic Research of China 973 Program (2011CB504403) , the China Science Fund for Creative Research Groups (81221003).