Hypoxic preconditioning activates endogenous mechanisms that protect against cerebral isch-emic and hypoxic injury. To better understand these protective mechanisms, adult rats were housed in a hypoxic environment (8% O2/92% N2) for 3 hours, and then in a normal oxygen environment for 12 hours. Their cerebrospinal fluid was obtained to culture cortical neurons from newb rats for 1 day, and then the neurons were exposed to oxygen-glucose deprivation for 1.5 hours. The cerebrospinal lfuid from rats subjected to hypoxic preconditioning reduced oxygen-glucose deprivation-induced injury, increased survival rate, upregulated Bcl-2 expression and downregulated Bax expression in the cultured cortical neurons, compared with control. These results indicate that cerebrospinal lfuid from rats given hypoxic preconditioning protects against oxygen-glucose deprivation-induced injury by affecting apoptosis-related protein expres-sion in neurons from newb rats.