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Biomedical subjects

J F Flood

Publications and source records attributed to J F Flood.

115 records · Page 7Linked to original sources
PubMedDate not supplied

Pituitary adenylate cyclase activating polypeptide (PACAP) reduces food intake in mice.

Pituitary adenylate cyclase activating peptide (PACAP) is a peptide that is present in the hypothalamus and other areas of the rat brain. This study demonstrates that PACAP reduces food intake after intracerebroventricular injection in food-deprived mice. Behavioral analysis suggests that this decrease in food intake is, in part, compensated for by an increase in other behaviors. Pituitary adenylate cyclase activating peptide also was demonstrated to antagonize increased food intake resulting from administration of neuropeptide Y. Thus, PACAP joins a growing list of neuropeptides involved in the central regulation of food intake.

Animals↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Differential effects of amylin on memory processing using peripheral and central routes of administration.

Amylin is a peptide hormone secreted from the beta cells of the pancreatic islets. Amylin was administered peripherally or centrally following weak or strong training on footshock avoidance conditioning in a T-maze. Under conditions of weak training, amylin improved memory retention in a dose-dependent manner. Under conditions of strong training, it impaired retention over the same dose range. Central administration of amylin in mice given strong training impaired retention but had no effect on the retention of mice given weak training. These findings suggest that the mechanisms of action by which amylin altered memory processing are different for peripheral and central administration. Peripherally secreted amylin may play a role in the amnesia seen in diabetes and the memory enhancement following glucose administration.

Amyloid↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Age-related changes in footshock avoidance acquisition and retention in senescence accelerated mouse (SAM).

An inbred strain has been developed which exhibits some characteristics of aging in mice as young 6 months of age. The strain was designated "Senescence Accelerated Mouse" (SAM). A subline of the SAM strain, P/8, has an early onset of impaired learning in appetitive and aversive training tasks. Simple aversive and appetitive tasks were learned normally up to 12 months of age, whereas more difficult tasks detected impairment as early as 6 months of age while the mice still had good general health. Comparable impairment of learning and memory in C57BL/6Nnia mice was not detected until about 24 months of age which is near the end of the strain's lifespan when general health declines. In the present study, we report age-dependent impairment of acquisition and retention for footshock avoidance conditioning. Long-term (1 week) but not short-term (1 h) retention was adversely effected by aging. In 12-month-old P/8 mice, practicing the avoidance response (overtraining) did not alleviate the impairment of long-term memory processing.

Aging↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Age-related changes in the pharmacological improvement of retention in senescence accelerated mouse (SAM).

The P/8 line of the senescence accelerated mouse (SAM) model exhibits characteristics of aging early in its lifespan including an early onset of impaired learning and memory which becomes progressively worse with age. Age-matched controls of the R/1 line do not show impaired learning and memory. We report age-related changes in the drug dosage needed to improve 1 week retention in the P/8 but not R/1 line. The results indicate that 8-month-old P/8 mice show a reduced sensitivity to memory enhancing doses of cholinomimetics and an increased sensitivity to a serotonin antagonist compared to 4-month-old mice. By 12 months of age, improvement of retention required still higher doses of cholinomimetics and even lower doses of the serotonin antagonist. Higher doses of an opioid antagonist and a dopamine agonist were needed to improve retention in 12-month-old mice. A GABA antagonist and an alpha noradrenergic agonist improved retention at the same dose in mice 4, 8, and 12 months of age.

Aging↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Age-related changes in hippocampal drug facilitation of memory processing in SAMP8 mice.

SAMP8/TaJf(P8) mouse strain has an inherited age-related impairment of learning and memory, while age-matched subjects of the closely related SAMR1/TaJf(R1) show no impairment. After training on footshock avoidance, P8 and R1 received a drug injection into the hippocampus. Retention was tested 1 week later. The results indicate that bicuculline (GABA antagonist), SKF38393 (DA agonist), and ST587 (NE agonist) facilitated retention with little change in the dose-response curves for P8 mice 4, 8, and 12 months of age. L-glutamate, acting at the NMDA receptor, showed a modest decline in ability to improve retention with increasing age. Arecoline, a muscarinic agonist, had the strongest trend for an age-related decline in potency. The same drug treatments yielded dose-dependent facilitation of retention but no age-related changes in R1 mice. Reduced cholinergic activity in the hippocampus may be, in part, responsible for age-related decline in memory retention in P8 mice.

2,3,4,5-Tetrahydro-7,8-dihydroxy-1-phenyl-1H-3-ben↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Effect of acute arecoline, tacrine and arecoline + tacrine post-training administration on retention in old mice.

The amnesias characteristic of Alzheimer's disease and other age-related dementias are refractory to conventional pharmacotherapy. A recent treatment strategy is to combine drugs to improve their memory enhancing effect. We previously reported that in young weakly trained mice, the combination of arecoline and tacrine was more effective on a mg/kg basis than either drug administered alone. This was true whether the route of administration was intracerebroventricular, subcutaneous or oral. We now report that 24 month old mice trained to avoid footshock in a T-maze show poor retention when tested one week later. Subcutaneous administration of arecoline, tacrine (also referred to as tetrahydroaminoacridine, THA) and arecoline plus tacrine administered immediately after T-maze footshock avoidance training enhanced retention of 24 month old mice compared to the saline-injected control. Since the combination was as effective as the single drug treatments even though 96% less arecoline and 99.7% less tacrine was administered, the combination showed marked potentiation of drug action of memory processing.

Aging↗