Effects of prenatal amphetamine exposure on behavior in adult rats

New Orleans

Congreso; 2000 Society for Neuroscience Meeting; 2000

Studies have reported that d-amphetamine (AMPH) can induce a schizophreniform psychosis in humans as well as an abnormal behavioral pattern in animals which resembles the psychotic symptoms observed in man. Mid-pregnancy is a critical period for development of fetal abnormalities causing behavioral and neuropathologic changes in adult offspring. This study shows that AMPH (4 mg/kg/day) administered during the second week of pregnancy to Wistar rats, increases the locomotor activity and stereotyped behavior, induced by amphetamine (3 mg/kg) and apomorphine (APO, 1 and 1.5 mg/kg), on adult male rats. Cognitive deficits observed in psychosis like schizophrenia are related to hippocampal dysfunction. When we studied working memory, which was assessed by radial maze, and spatial memory by means of Morris water maze test, we did not find any differences between adult rats prenatally exposed to AMPH and controls. Furthermore, the hippocampal synaptic plasticity measured by the threshold to induce long-term potentiation, on the granule cells of the dentate gyrus, was similar in both adult rats prenatally exposed to AMPH and in controls. We proposed the prenatal AMPH intoxication as a useful model to study certain aspects of the biological alterations underlying the behavioral changes characterizing AMPH prenatal psychosis and positive signs of schizophrenia