Keywords:soflurane;ischemic tolerance;transient cerebral ischemia;rat

    INTRODUCTION

    The“ischemic tolerance in brain”found-ed by Kitagawa et al[1] is an ideal model to investigate the mechanisms of cerebral ischemic damage and neuroprotec-tion.But exposing patients to brief ischemic events before an anticipated cerebral ischemia occurs seems difficult and unac-ceptable in clinical practice.Therefore，some investigators studied the possibility of chemical preconditioning which mimics ischemic preconditioning，and demonstrated that some chemicals could induce the ischemic tolerance in brain[2] .How-ever，the clinical application of these chemical substances is yet to be elucidated because of their toxicity or side effects.Recently，isoflurane and sevoflurane have been proved to be able to mimic ischemic preconditioning in myocardial is-chemia[3-6] .Whether they could also induce the same effects in brain has not been reported yet.Therefore，the present study was undertaken to testify if isoflurane could induce is-chemic tolerance in brain on middle cerebral artery occlusion(MCAO)rat model. ......