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Chronic treatment of rats with Desipramine enhances performance on an attentional set shifting task
Author(s) -
Lapiz M. Danet S.,
Morilak David A
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.20.4.a678-a
Subject(s) - desipramine , wisconsin card sorting test , antidepressant , psychology , behavioural despair test , arousal , stimulus (psychology) , distraction , cognition , medicine , audiology , neuroscience , neuropsychology , anxiety , cognitive psychology , psychiatry
Chronic antidepressant (AD) treatment induces regulatory changes in monoamine neurotransmission, but how such changes can affect cognitive processes related to clinical efficacy remains unclear. One limitation is a lack of animal models for the cognitive aspects of depression and AD efficacy, such as attention and arousal. Thus, we investigated the effects of chronic desipramine (DMI) treatment on performance of rats on an attentional set shifting test (ASST), a rat version of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Male Sprague‐Dawley rats were treated chronically with saline or DMI (7.5 mg/kg/day) by osmotic minipump for 21 days (n=8/group). Rats were food‐restricted (14 g/day) for 7 days and trained to dig for food in small pots differentiated by the digging media and the odor with which they were marked. Rats were then tested on a series of increasingly difficult discriminative tasks, including simple and compound discriminations, stimulus reversals, and intradimensional and extradimensional (ED) set shifts. A criterion of 6 consecutive correct responses were required on a task to progress to the next stage. Significant main effects of Drug and Task were observed on the number of trials to criterion (p<0.05). Post hoc analyses showed that chronic DMI treatment enhanced performance specifically on the ED set shifting task (p <0.05). We showed previously that acute DMI improved overall performance on the ASST, but not on any specific task. Thus, the enhancement of ED set shifting by chronic DMI suggests that the ASST may be a useful model to study cognitive effects of drugs that target noradrenergic neurotransmission, and mechanisms underlying the time‐dependence of AD clinical effects. Support by NIH grant MH53851