Low-dose Systemic Scopolamine Disrupts Context Conditioning in Rats

Overview

Journal J Psychopharmacol

Publisher Sage Publications

Specialty Pharmacology

Date 2017 Apr 19

PMID 28417664

Citations 4

Authors

Laura Luyten

Shauni Nuyts

Tom Beckers

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Cholinergic neurotransmission plays a key role in learning and memory. Prior research with rats indicated that a low dose of pre-training scopolamine (0.1 mg/kg), a cholinergic receptor antagonist, did not affect cued fear conditioning, but did block renewal when injected before extinguishing a conditioned tone, opening up opportunities to pharmacologically improve exposure therapy for anxiety patients. Before translating these findings to the clinic, it is important to carefully examine how scopolamine affects contextual fear memories. Here, we investigated the effects of scopolamine on encoding of contextual anxiety and its generalization in male Wistar rats. We found a profound disruption of context conditioning, suggesting that, even at a low dose, systemic scopolamine may influence contextual encoding in the hippocampus, particularly when the context is the best predictor for the presence of shocks.

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