Damage to the vestibular inner ear causes long-term changes in neuronal nitric oxide synthase expression in the rat hippocampus.
The vestibular inner ear detects head acceleration and initiates compensatory eye movement and postural reflexes that help keep the visual image of the world stable on the retina, and maintain balance, during unexpected head movement. The most primitive vestibular systems are estimated to have evolved more than 500 million years ago and in mammalian and submammalian species the vestibular reflexes are mediated by basic brainstem pathways (see Wilson and Melvill Jones, 1979 for review). Although the contributions of the vestibular system to higher cognitive function have generally received less attention than its reflexive roles, vestibular sensory information is transmitted to higher centres in the brain and humans with vestibular damage are known to experience debilitating perceptual illusions (see Curthoys and Halmagyi, 1995; Berthoz, 1996 for reviews). Increasing behavioural and neurophysiological evidence suggests that the hippocampus uses information from the vestibular inner ear in order to build up maps of space that can be used in the development of spatial memory during learning tasks (McNaughton et al., 1991; Chapuis et al., 1992; Wiener and Berthoz, 1993; O'Mara et al., 1994; Wiener et al., 1995; Gavrilov et al., 1995; Stackman and Taube, 1996; Vitte et al., 1996; Taube et al., 1996; Save et al., 1998; Peruch et al., 1999; Cuthbert et al., 2000; Russell et al., 2000). However, to date, there has been no indication of the long-term neurochemical effects of the loss of vestibular input on hippocampal function. Since nitric oxide has been implicated in the mechanisms of hippocampal synaptic plasticity associated with the development of short-term memory (e.g. Schuman and Madison, 1991; Schuman et al., 1994; Arancio et al., 1996; Wu et al., 1997; Lu et al., 1999), we examined whether changes occur in the activity and expression of the enzymes responsible for nitric oxide production (nitric oxide synthases) in subregions of the rat hippocampus at different times following unilateral peripheral vestibular lesions, using western blotting and radioenzymatic assays. We found a decreased expression of neuronal nitric oxide synthase in the ipsilateral dentate gyrus at 2 weeks following the vestibular damage and not before, that may be related to the long-term effects of the loss of vestibular input on hippocampal function. These results support the hypothesis that head movement and position information derived from the vestibular inner ear may be important for the normal function of the hippocampus.