Fig. 3

Endothelin-1 does not increase susceptibility to spreading depolarization in rat. a At first, endothelin-1 (ET-1) or vehicle was administrated from tail vein in a blinded manner. Single-square pulses of increasing duration and intensity (50–4000 μC) were applied at 5-min intervals until a spreading depolarization (SD) was observed. Then, SD frequency was assessed by topical cortical application of KCl and represented as the number of SDs per hour. After the additional ET-1 or vehicle administration, another hemisphere was studied consecutively. b Representative tracings of electrical threshold for SD and SD frequency by topical cortical application of KCl in each group. (C) Whisker box plots (horizontal line, median; box, interquartile range; whiskers, full range) show that endothelin (1 nmol/kg, n = 7) did not affect the electrical threshold for SD (vs vehicle, 2way ANOVA with post hoc analysis using Sidak’s multiple comparisons test). Similarly, endothelin also did not alter KCl-induced SD (versus vehicle, 2-way ANOVA followed by Sidak’s multiple comparisons test). The ends of the whiskers represent minimal and maximal data points. The horizontal lines within the box indicate the median. Circles show averaged number of the result of right and left hemispheres