Ricerc@Sapienza

Amphetamine is a potent psychostimulant which increases the release of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter crucially involved in the regulation of memory for stressful experiences. Here we investigated amphetamine effects on consolidation of long term object recognition memory in rats exposed to different stressful conditions. In a second set of experiments, we evaluated whether such effects were dependent on the activation of the peripheral adrenergic system.

Drugs of abuse have long been recognized to affect memory processes. Here we tested the effects of two psychostimulants, Amphetamine and the “bath salt” MDPV, on the accuracy of memory. We used the inhibitory avoidance (IA) discrimination task, a novel variant of the IA task suitable to study memory accuracy in rodents. Rats were trained and tested in three different contextually modified IA boxes, two visited during the training session and one visited only during the test session.

The mechanisms by which drugs of abuse affect the accuracy of memory processes are not well understood. Here we tested the effects of the psychostimulants Amphetamine and the “bath salt” MDPV in an inhibitory avoidance discrimination task.