Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Leon Condat | Email: leoncondat@gmail.com
León Condat 1°, Gaston Calfa 1°, Irene Martijena 1°
1° Instituto de Farmacología Experimental de Córdoba (CONICET) Departamento de Farmacologia Otto Orsingher – Facultad de Ciencias Químicas – UNC
Excessive ethanol consumption is capable of inducing neuroinflammatory processes, resulting in limbic structures changes which, in turn, can impact on memory and learning processes. In this sense, the protocol for ethanol administration used in the present work becomes relevant. It was designed for the study of the above mentioned phenomena but until now, it lacks of studies about its impact on emotional-like memories potentially associated with the neuroinflammatory changes. To do that, adult male C57BL/6N mice were exposed to a chronic consumption of ethanol in a liquid diet (5% v/v) with a final administration of 3 g/kg (i.p.) ethanol. On day 5 of withdrawal, animals were trained with high or low intensity Pavlovian fear conditioning. In the first case and after the extinction process, a subthreshold reminder of the fear memory induced a greater expression of it in a subsequent retention test in withdrawn animals. On the other hand, these animals expressed a greater fear response than control group, as well as a trend for an increased fear response induced by exposure to a new context after mild training. Taken altogether, these alterations in the discrimination of contextual cues and in the reacquisition of fear memories as well as the observed emotional sensitization could be linked to the aforementioned neurochemical changes and concurrently represent the first characterization of the effect of this alcohol consumption protocol in terms of emotional memory profile.