Cholinergic rescue of neurocognitive insult following third-trimester equivalent alcohol exposure in rats.

Cholinergic rescue of neurocognitive insult following third-trimester equivalent alcohol exposure in rats. Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2019 Jun 08;:107030 Authors: Heroux NA, Horgan CJ, Rosen JB, Stanton ME Abstract Neonatal ethanol exposure during the third trimester equivalent of human pregnancy in the rat significantly impairs hippocampal and prefrontal neurobehavioral functioning. Postnatal day [PD] 4-9 ethanol exposure in rats disrupts long-term context memory formation, resulting in abolished post-shock and retention test freezing in a variant of contextual fear conditioning called the Context Preexposure Facilitation Effect (CPFE). This behavioral impairment is accompanied by disrupted medial prefrontal, but not dorsal hippocampal expression of the immediate early genes (IEGs) c-Fos, Arc, Egr-1, and Npas4 (Heroux et al., 2019). The current experiment examined if systemic administration of the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor physostigmine (PHY) prior to context learning would rescue prefrontal IEG expression and freezing in the CPFE. From PD4-9, Long-Evans rats received oral intubation of ethanol (EtOH; 5.25g/kg/day) or sham-intubation (SI). Rats received a systemic injection of saline (SAL) or PHY (0.01mg/kg) prior to all three phases (Experiment 1) or just context exposure (Experiment 2) in the CPFE from PD31-33. A subset of rats were sacrificed 30min after context learning to assay changes in IEG expression in the medial prefrontal ...
Source: Neurobiology of Learning and Memory - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Neurobiol Learn Mem Source Type: research