Ibogaine has attracted increasing attention as a potential treatment for substance use disorders; however, its clinical application remains limited by well-documented cardiotoxicity, and its safety during early development is poorly understood. Here, we investigated the developmental cardiotoxic and neurobehavioral effects of ibogaine using zebrafish embryos and larvae as a translational model....
Anxiety and stress-related disorders affect over 280 million individuals worldwide and remain inadequately treated by current pharmacotherapies, which are often limited in efficacy and tolerability. Ketamine produces rapid therapeutic effects in mood and anxiety disorders, but its clinical use is constrained by dissociative side effects and abuse liability. Ketamine metabolites, particularly (2...
Mindfulness meditation has been studied for its many health benefits, yet the neural mechanisms that facilitate these benefits are still opaque. The present review examines adaptive attention processes and associated dynamic brain networks (e.g., executive control network, default mode network) that are engaged during mindfulness meditation, demonstrating emerging evidence of durable...
Behavioural Brain ResearchMarch 28, 2026Lucas Villar Pedrosa Da Silva Pantoja, Luiza Fernanda Ramos Soares, Brenda Costa Da Conceição et al.
Adolescence is a period of profound behavioral changes associated with high brain vulnerability to negative stimuli including psychotropic drugs misuse which may contribute to the development of psychiatric disorders. Ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist, is an anesthetic agent used in a recreational manner in night clubs and raves, especially by intranasal route. The psychedelic effects of...
3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is a psychomotor stimulant drug. While much research has examined the effects of MDMA in adults, relatively little research has examined the effects in adolescents. Adolescence is a unique period of brain development, and the effects of MDMA may differ in adolescents compared to adults. In this review, we summarize the literature on the effects of acute...
Social factors significantly influence the initiation and progression of cannabis use and cannabis use disorder. Although cannabis is the most widely used drug globally, its social cognitive aspects and neural correlates have rarely been studied. To evaluate the findings to date and to guide future research, this systematic review assesses neuroimaging evidence on the associations between...
The present study explored the behavioral stressing action of a 15-min forced swim test (FST) session, changes in CA3-medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) connection responsivity, and whether ketamine reverses such changes. Two groups of male Wistar rats were subjected to a 15-min FST session. Sixty minutes later, they were injected with either saline (stress [STR] SAL group) or ketamine (STR KET...
Ischemic stroke is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Survivors face disability and psychiatric sequelae resulting from ischemia-induced cell death and associated neuroinflammation, and oxidative stress. Herbal medicines have been shown to elicit neuroprotective effects following stroke due to their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. Preliminary evidence suggests that...
Consciousness, at its simplest, represents awareness of self in relation to the outside world. This can be divided further into the reasoning and rationality of Access consciousness (A-C) versus the experiential and 'what it's like' of Phenomenal consciousness (P-C). A-C is directly measurable, using standard tests of cognition and memory. However, owing to the subjective nature of P-C, its...
Behavioural Brain ResearchMarch 28, 2025Teresa Belem Mares-Barbosa, Ares Orlando Cuellar-Santoyo, Victor Manuel Ruiz-Rodríguez et al.3 citations
Ketamine hydrochloride serves multiple purposes, including its use as a general anesthetic, treatment for depression, and recreational drug. In studies involving rodents, ketamine is utilized as a model for schizophrenia. However, it is unclear whether age affects the behavioral response induced by repeated ketamine administration and if it modifies the expression levels of N-methyl-D-aspartate...
Behavioural Brain ResearchJanuary 5, 2025Khanyiso Bright Shangase, Mluleki Luvuno, Musa V Mabandla6 citations
The pathophysiology behind negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia is not well understood, thus limiting the effectiveness of treatment on these symptoms. Developing reliable animal model of schizophrenia is vital to advance our understanding on the neurobiological basis of the disorder. Double hit is used to refer to the use of two schizophrenia inducing interventions viz ketamine...
Fear memory, a fundamental symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is improved by (2R, 6R)-hydroxynorketamine ((2R, 6R)-HNK) administration. However, the phase of fear memory in which the injected drug is the most effective at mitigating PTSD-like effects remains unknown. This study aimed to explore the effects of (2 R, 6 R)-HNK administration during three phases [acquisition (AP),...
Ketamine is an NMDA receptor antagonist that has antidepressant and anesthetic properties. At subanesthetic doses, ketamine induces transient psychosis in humans, and is used to model psychosis in experimental animals. In rodents, subanesthetic doses of ketamine increase the power of high-frequency oscillations (HFO, > 100 Hz) in the electroencephalogram (EEG), a frequency band linked to...
Given the critical role of maternal care in the neurodevelopment of offspring, this study aimed to investigate the effects of the psychedelic substance 25H-NBOMe on maternal behavior in lactating rats and its subsequent impact on the social and neurodevelopmental behavior of the offspring. We administered two different dosages of 25H-NBOMe (0.3mg/kg and 1.0mg/kg; i,p,) to lactating rats and...
Behavioural Brain ResearchAugust 24, 2023Daniel T Sangiamo, Michael J Weingarten, Nnamdi G Nelson et al.
Combined use of cannabis and alcohol is common in adolescents. However, the extent to which such polydrug exposure affects the brain and behaviors remains under-investigated in preclinical studies. This study tested the hypothesis that combined exposure of Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive constituent of cannabis, and alcohol will have additive effects on cognitive...
The delayed onset of monoaminergic antidepressants and disadvantages of traditional administration routes created the need for alternative non-invasive delivery methods with rapid onset therapeutic effect. Ketamine attracted attention as a fast-acting glutamatergic antidepressant with ideal physiochemical properties for alternative routes of administration. However, there is no sufficient data...
The relationship between serotonin dysfunction and schizophrenia commenced with the discovery of the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) that has high affinity for 5-HT2A receptors. Activation of these receptors produces perceptual and behavioural changes such as illusions, visual hallucinations and locomotor hyperactivity. Using prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle, which...
Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats exhibit depression-like characteristics and decreased sensitivity to monoamine-based antidepressants, making them a suitable model of treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Ketamine has emerged recently as a rapidly acting antidepressant with high efficacy in TRD. Our aim was to determine whether subanaesthetic doses of ketamine can correct sleep and electroencephalogram...
Psilocybin and its active metabolite psilocin are hallucinogenic serotonergic agonists with high affinity for several serotonin receptors. In addition to underlying the hallucinogenic effects of these compounds, serotonin receptor activation also has important effects on decision-making and goal-directed behaviors. The impact of psilocybin and psilocin on these cognitive systems, however,...
Rapastinel, a positive N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) modulator with rapid-acting antidepressant properties, rescues memory deficits in rodents. We have previously reported that a single intravenous dose of rapastinel, significantly, but only transiently, prevented and rescued deficits in the novel object recognition (NOR) test, a measure of episodic memory, produced by acute or...
The objective of this study was to evaluate the behavioral response of ayahuasca in rats submitted to neuroinflammation through the intraperitoneal application of lipopolysaccharide (0.63 mg/kg/mL). Eighty animals, male, about 90 days old, were divided into control and LPS groups and later into prevention and treatment subgroups. The prevention subgroup was administered ayahuasca or saline...
BACKGROUND Anesthesia and psychotropic drugs in pregnant women may cause long-term effects on the brain development of unborn babies. The authors set out to investigate the neurotoxicity of S-ketamine, which possesses anesthetic and antidepressant effects and may cause attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)- and depression-like behaviors in offspring mice. METHODS Pregnant mice were...
This review provides an update on Neurorepresentationalism, a theoretical framework that defines conscious experience as multimodal, situational survey and explains its neural basis from brain systems constructing best-guess representations of sensations originating in our environment and body [1]. It posits that conscious experience is characterized by five essential hallmarks: (i) multimodal...
Considering the long-lasting effects of ayahuasca on the brain and emotional processing, the objective of this study was to evaluate the behavioural and neurobiological effects of repeated ayahuasca administration in an animal model of exploratory behaviour related to novel-environment anxiety. Male Wistar rats received water, 120, 240, 480 or 3600 mg/kg of resuspended freeze-dried ayahuasca by...
Schizophrenia is a chronic disease affecting 1% worldwide population, of which 30% are refractory to the available treatments: thus, searching for new pharmacological targets is imperative. The acute and repeated ketamine administration are validated preclinical models that recreate the behavioral and neurochemical features of this pathology, including the parvalbumin-expressing interneurons...