Schizophrenia is a debilitating neurodevelopmental disorder affecting 1% of the global population with heterogeneous symptoms including positive, negative, and cognitive. While treatment for positive symptoms exists, none have been developed to treat negative symptoms. Animal models of schizophrenia are required to test targeted treatments and since patients exhibit reduced effort (breakpoints)...
HighlightsSusceptible mice showed depressive‐like behaviors upon chronic social defeat stress.Plasma corticosterone concentration might predict susceptibility to chronic stress.Abnormal glucocorticoid receptor expression was associated with susceptibility.Ketamine exerted antidepressant effect via normalizing HPA axis response. &NA; Chronic stress is an important factor for depression. Most...
5-Methoxy-α-methyltryptamine (5-MeO-AMT) is a tryptamine derivative that is used recreationally because of its reported hallucinogenic and mood elevating effects. Studies suggest that the psychopharmacological effects of tryptamines involve serotonin receptor 2a (5-HTR2a) activation in the brain. The head-twitch response (HTR) is widely used as a behavioral correlate for assessing 5-HTR2a...
Atropine and scopolamine are classical muscarinic cholinergic antagonists that exert multiple CNS effects. Belonging to a group of deliriant hallucinogens, these drugs induce delirium-like hallucinations, hyperactivity, altered affective states and amnesia. However, as deliriants remain the least studied group of hallucinogens, their complex and poorly understood profiles necessitate further...
Ketamine acts as a rapid-acting antidepressant by restoring glutamatergic deficits and activating synaptic plasticity processes, with peak activity 24 h after infusion. Microtubule dynamics are known to play a key role in modulation of cytoskeleton and synaptic plasticity, as well as in signalling events in peripheral blood cells. Here, we correlated ketamine-induced change in...
Behavioural Brain ResearchFebruary 1, 2019Ingrid Brasilino Montenegro Bento De Souza, Ywlliane da Silva Rodrigues Meurer, Priscila Macedo Tavares et al.
Episodic-like memory refers to integration of where and when a certain event (what) happened. The glutamatergic neurotransmission, particularly AMPA and NMDA receptors, in the dorsal hippocampus mediates episodic recall. Ketamine is a non-competitive NMDA antagonist with effect on cognitive performance and plasticity. The goal of this study was to evaluate the acute action of ketamine on...
Meditation is an ancient practice that cultivates a calm yet focused mind; however, little is known about how short, practical meditation practices affect cognitive functioning in meditation-naïve populations. To address this question, we randomized subjects (ages of 18-45) who were non-experienced meditators into either a 13-min daily guided meditation session or a 13-min daily podcast...
Pregnenolone sulfate (PregS), an endogenous neurosteroid, which negatively and positively modulates gamma amino butyric acid subunit A (GABAA) and N-methyl D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors (R) respectively, among other potential neuroplastic changes on synaptic processes, has shown some beneficial effects on treating cognitive impairment associated with schizophrenia (CIAS) and negative symptoms....
Currently, there is not an effective treatment for 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) dependence but pharmacotherapies targeting glutamate neurotransmission are a promising strategy. Previously, we showed that blockade of glutamate NMDA and AMPA receptors impairs the conditioned rewarding effects of MDMA and cocaine, respectively. In this study we evaluated the role of AMPA receptors in...
HighlightsSubchronic PCP treatment did not interfere with olfactory function in male rats.Olfactory exploratory motivation was unaltered by subchronic PCP.Male rats treated with subchronic PCP spent more time investigating a novel social odour. ABSTRACT The olfactory system participates in many sensory processes, and olfactory endophenotypes appear in a variety of neurological disorders such as...
Abnormalities in prefrontal cortical and hippocampal GABAergic function are postulated to be major causes of the cognitive impairment associated with schizophrenia (CIAS). There are conflicting views on whether diminished or enhanced GABAergic activity contributes to the deficit in short-term novel object recognition (NOR) in the sub-chronic phencyclidine (scPCP) rodent model of CIAS. This...
R mRNA in the mPFC was significantly decreased to 5-Hydroxytryptamine7 (5-HT7) receptors in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) play a critical role in complex cognitive impairment in schizophrenia. The mouse model of schizophrenia was established through the neonatal administration of phencyclidine (nPCP). Recombinant adeno-associated virus-mediated gene knockdown was used to investigate the...
Interventions that promote mindfulness consistently show salutary effects on cognition and emotional wellbeing in adults, and more recently, in children and adolescents. However, we lack understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying mindfulness in youth that should allow for more judicious application of these interventions in clinical and educational settings. Using multi-echo...
Noribogaine is the main psychoactive metabolite of the hallucinogenic drug ibogaine, and is a particularly interesting compound potentially useful to treat dependence and various psychiatric disorders. Here, we report the effects of noribogaine on anxiety and locomotion in zebrafish (Danio rerio), a new promising model organism in neurobehavioral and psychopharmacological research. Adult...
It is estimated that 2.1 million young adults used MDMA/Ecstasy in the last year in Europe. Vulnerable subjects can develop dependence after MDMA abuse but currently there does not exist an effective treatment for this disorder. The nitric oxide (NO) pathway seems to have an important role on the rewarding effects of different drugs and has been proposed as a new pharmacological treatment for...
Cannabis sativa is one of the most widely recreational drugs and its use is more prevalent among depressed patients. Some studies reported that Cannabis has antidepressant effects while others showed increased depressive symptoms in Cannabis users. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the effect of Cannabis extract on the depressive-like rats. Twenty four rats were divided into:...
3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is known to induce dependence and psychosis in humans. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is involved in the synaptic plasticity and neurotrophy in midbrain dopaminergic neurons. This study aimed to investigate the role of BDNF in MDMA-induced dependence and psychosis. A single dose of MDMA (10mg/kg) induced BDNF mRNA expression in the prefrontal...
The aim of the study was to identify the anatomical bases involved in the subjective experience of time, by means of a voxel based symptom-lesion mapping (VLSM) study on patients with focal brain damage. Thirty-three patients (nineteen with right-hemisphere lesions -RBD, and fourteen with left lesion- LBD) and twenty-eight non-neurological controls (NNC) underwent the semi-structured...
Animal model studies using equal numbers of males and females are sparse in psychiatry research. Given the marked sex differences observed in psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, using both males and females in research studies is an important requirement. Thus the aim of this study was to examine sex differences in psychotomimetic-induced behavioural deficits relevant to psychosis. We...
Adverse life experiences such as social stress may make an individual more vulnerable to drug addiction and mental disorders associated with drug consumption. The present work aimed to evaluate the effects of stress induced by acute social defeat combined with the administration of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) on depression-like behaviour, memory function and motor response to drug...
Little is known about the pharmacological effects of amphetamine derivatives. In the present study, the effect on social preference and anxiety-like behavior of 2,5-dimetoxy-4-bromo-amphetamine hydrobromide (DOB) and para-methoxyamphetamine (PMA), in comparison with 3,4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) was investigated in zebrafish, an emerging model to study emotional behavior in an...
One of the most striking discoveries in the treatment of major depression was the finding that infusion of a single sub-anesthetic dose of ketamine induces rapid and sustained antidepressant effects in treatment-resistant depressed patients. However, ketamine's antidepressant-like actions are transient and can only be sustained by repeated drug treatment. Despite the fact that women experience...
Negative symptoms in schizophrenia remain an unmet clinical need. There is no licensed treatment specifically for this debilitating aspect of the disorder and effect sizes of new therapies are too small to make an impact on quality of life and function. Negative symptoms are multifactorial but often considered in terms of two domains, expressive deficit incorporating blunted affect and poverty...
Fear-potentiated startle (FPS) and prepulse inhibition (PPI) of acoustic startle are two widely used paradigms specifically designed to capture the impact of negative emotion (e.g. fear) and preattentive function on startle response. Currently, there is no single paradigm that incorporates both FPS and PPI, making it impossible to examine the potential interactions between fear and attention in...
GLYX-13 (rapastinel), a tetrapeptide (Thr-Pro-Pro-Thr-amide), has been reported to have fast acting antidepressant properties in man based upon its N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) glycine site functional partial agonism. Ketamine, a non-competitive NMDAR antagonist, also reported to have fast acting antidepressant properties, produces cognitive impairment in rodents and man, whereas...