The Neonatal pain alters the effect of antidepressant on integrative brain function in rats
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33910/2687-1270-2025-6-1-75-84Keywords:
neonatal inflammatory pain, fluoxetine, adolescent development, early adulthood, spatial learning and memory, corticosteroneAbstract
The influence of neonatal inflammatory pain on the effects of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine — administered during adolescence — was investigated in relation to integrative brain function in early adulthood in rats. These developmental periods in rats correspond to the first and second peaks of neuropsychological developmental deviations observed in humans. We previously demonstrated that neonatal pain induces spatial memory deficits in adolescent male rats in the Morris water maze. Here, we hypothesized that fluoxetine might attenuate the adverse effects associated with the second peak of developmental deviations. In control rats of both sexes, fluoxetine had no effect on spatial learning, as indicated by a decrease in escape latency from day one to day five of training, as well as on first-day spatial memory and long-term memory. However, in rats exposed to neonatal pain, fluoxetine exerted notable sex-specific effects: it produced an antinociceptive effect in females when testing first-day spatial memory impaired by neonatal inflammatory pain. Additionally, females exhibited poorer long-term memory compared to males and relative to their own first-day memory performance, along with shorter memory retention and reduced hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis reactivity. In contrast, male rats showed no differences between groups in either type of spatial memory. These findings suggest that neonatal inflammatory pain selectively modifies fluoxetine’s effects on integrative brain function and HPA axis reactivity in female rats during early adulthood.
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