title: Pilocarpine seizures cause age-dependent impairment in auditory location discrimination.
abstract: Children who have status epilepticus have continuous or rapidly repeating seizures that may be life-threatening and may cause life-long changes in brain and behavior. The extent to which status epilepticus causes deficits in auditory discrimination is unknown. A naturalistic auditory location discrimination method was used to evaluate this question using an animal model of status epilepticus. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were injected with saline on postnatal day (P) 20, or a convulsant dose of pilocarpine on P20 or P45. Pilocarpine on either day induced status epilepticus; status epilepticus at P45 resulted in CA3 cell loss and spontaneous seizures, whereas P20 rats had no cell loss or spontaneous seizures. Mature rats were trained with sound-source location and sound-silence discriminations. Control (saline P20) rats acquired both discriminations immediately. In status epilepticus (P20) rats, acquisition of the sound-source location discrimination was moderately impaired. Status epilepticus (P45) rats failed to acquire either sound-source location or sound-silence discriminations. Status epilepticus in rat causes an age-dependent, long-term impairment in auditory discrimination. This impairment may explain one cause of impaired auditory location discrimination in humans.
authors.affiliation: Children's Hospital, Boston, USA. John.Neill@Liu.edu
authors.forename: John C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Neill
authors.forename: Zhao
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Mohammad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mikati
authors.forename: Gregory L
authors.initials: GL
authors.lastname: Holmes
mesh_terms: D000375:Aging / Q000187:drug effects*; D000818:Animals; D000831:Animals, Newborn; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000187:drug effects*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D002470:Cell Survival / Q000187:drug effects; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000187:drug effects*; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000187:drug effects; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000187:drug effects / Q000473:pathology; D008297:Male; D018721:Muscarinic Agonists / Q000633:toxicity*; D009474:Neurons / Q000187:drug effects / Q000473:pathology; D010862:Pilocarpine / Q000633:toxicity*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000187:drug effects; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000187:drug effects; D013017:Sound Localization / Q000187:drug effects*; D013226:Status Epilepticus / Q000139:chemically induced* / Q000473:pathology
chemical_list: D018721:Muscarinic Agonists; D010862:Pilocarpine