Chronic stress impairs rat spatial memory on the Y maze, and this effect is blocked by tianeptine pretreatment.
Chronic restraint stress causes significant dendritic atrophy of CA3 pyramidal neurons that reverts to baseline within a week. Therefore, the authors assessed the functional consequences of this atrophy quickly (within hours) using the Y maze. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated that rats relied on extrinsic, spatial cues located outside of the Y maze to determine arm location and that rats with hippocampal damage (through kainic acid, colchicine, or trimethyltin) had spatial memory impairments. After the Y maze was validated as a hippocampally relevant spatial task, Experiment 4 showed that chronic restraint stress impaired spatial memory performance on the Y maze when rats were tested the day after the last stress session and that tianeptine prevented the stress-induced spatial memory impairment. These data are consistent with the previously demonstrated ability of tianeptine to prevent chronic stress-induced atrophy of the CA3 dendrites.
Conrad
C D
CD
Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology, Rockefeller University, New York 10021, USA. conradc@rockvax.rockefeller.edu
Galea
L A
LA
Kuroda
Y
Y
McEwen
B S
BS
D000818:Animals; D000929:Antidepressive Agents, Tricyclic / Q000494:pharmacology*; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology*; D007103:Immobilization; D008297:Male; D018782:Maze Learning / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology*; D008568:Memory / Q000187:drug effects / Q000502:physiology*; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D012149:Restraint, Physical; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000523:psychology*; D013841:Thiazepines / Q000494:pharmacology*
D000929:Antidepressive Agents, Tricyclic; D013841:Thiazepines; C050504:tianeptine