The middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) model was introduced more than 3 decades ago to simulate human stroke. Till now, it is the most common platform to investigate stroke-induced pathological changes as well as to discover new drugs and treatments. Induction of general anesthesia is mandatory to induce this model, and different laboratories are using various anesthetic drugs, which might affect MCAO results. Therefore, the present study was designed to compare the impacts of several widely used anesthetic regimens on the MCAO outcomes. Here, adult male rats were anesthetized by isoflurane inhalation, intraperitoneal injection of chloral hydrate (CH), intraperitoneal injection of ketamine-xylazine, or subcutaneous administration of ketamine-xylazine, then subjected to 30 min MCAO. Survival rate, body weight change, infarct size, as well as cognitive and neurological performance were evaluated up to 3 days after the surgery. Our findings revealed CH caused the highest, whereas subcutaneous ketamine-xylazine led to the lowest mortality. Meanwhile, there were no significant differences in the body weight loss, infarct size, cognitive impairments, and neurological deficits among the experimental groups. Based on the current results, we proposed that subcutaneous injection of ketamine-xylazine could be an effective anesthetic regimen in the rat model of MCAO with several advantages such as low mortality, cost-effectiveness, safety, ease of administration, and not requiring specialized equipment.
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