LaSarge Candi L, Montgomery Karienn Souza, Tucker Catherine, Slaton G Simona, Griffith William H, Setlow Barry, Bizon Jennifer L
Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4235, United States.
Neurobiol Aging. 2007 Jun;28(6):928-36. doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2006.04.010. Epub 2006 Jun 23.
Rodent models of cognitive aging routinely use spatial performance on the water maze to characterize medial temporal lobe integrity. Water maze performance is dependent upon this system and, as in the aged human population, individual differences in learning abilities are reliably observed among spatially characterized aged rats. However, unlike human aging in which cognitive deficits rarely occur in isolation, few non-spatial learning deficits have been identified in association with spatial impairment among aged rats. In this study, a subset of male aged Fischer 344 rats was impaired both in water maze and odor discrimination tasks, whereas other aged cohorts performed on par with young adult rats in both settings. The odor discrimination learning deficits were reliable across multiple problems. Moreover, these deficits were not a consequence of anosmia and were specific to olfactory learning, as cognitively impaired aged rats performed normally on an analogous non-olfactory discrimination task. These are among the first data to describe an aging model in which individual variability among aged rat cognition occurs across two independent behavioral domains.
认知衰老的啮齿动物模型通常利用水迷宫中的空间表现来表征内侧颞叶的完整性。水迷宫表现依赖于该系统，并且与老年人群一样，在空间特征明确的老年大鼠中可以可靠地观察到学习能力的个体差异。然而，与人类衰老不同，认知缺陷很少单独出现，在老年大鼠中，很少有非空间学习缺陷与空间损伤相关联。在本研究中，一部分雄性老年Fischer 344大鼠在水迷宫和气味辨别任务中均受损，而其他老年组在这两种情况下的表现与年轻成年大鼠相当。气味辨别学习缺陷在多个问题中都是可靠的。此外，这些缺陷不是嗅觉丧失的结果，并且特定于嗅觉学习，因为认知受损的老年大鼠在类似的非嗅觉辨别任务中表现正常。这些是最早描述衰老模型的数据之一，其中老年大鼠认知的个体差异出现在两个独立的行为领域。
