Recent studies showed that 2-h ischemia caused damage of BBB integrity in non-infarcted ventromedial striatum (Jin et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2016; Sun et al., 2017) and 2-h ischemia-induced matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) induction lead to the disruption of the BBB integrity (Jin et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2016). Here, MMP2 is linked to ischemia.