title: Permanent occlusion of bilateral internal carotid arteries produces cognitive deficits in two learning behavior tasks.
abstract: We investigated the effects of permanent bilateral occlusion of the internal carotid arteries (2ICAO) on the learning and memory performances in rats to evaluate the permanent 2ICAO rats as a model for vascular dementia. The learning and memory performance was tested by a step-through passive avoidance task and an 8-arm radial maze task. Permanent 2ICAO decreased cerebral blood flows in the cortex and hippocampus by 46.3 +/- 3.3 and 21.1 +/- 4.6%, respectively, when measured at 15 min after occlusion. In the passive avoidance task, the 2ICAO rats showed no impairment of learning or of memory retention when tested 1 h after learning trial, while they showed a shorter latency than sham-operated rats when tested 24 h after learning trial. In the radial maze learning task, the non-pretrained 2ICAO rats showed impairment. The pretrained 2ICAO rats had no deficit in the radial maze retention task but they showed impaired performance when a 3-min delay was interposed in the task. These results suggest that permanent 2ICAO is a useful animal model for studying vascular dementia.
authors.affiliation: Division of Pharmacology, Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Watanabe
authors.forename: J W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Ni
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sakai
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Matsumoto
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Murakami
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tohda
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001157:Arterial Occlusive Diseases / Q000150:complications*; D001362:Avoidance Learning; D002340:Carotid Artery Diseases / Q000150:complications*; D002343:Carotid Artery, Internal; D002560:Cerebrovascular Circulation; D015140:Dementia, Vascular / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D008297:Male; D018782:Maze Learning; D051381:Rats; D017208:Rats, Wistar