Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics of Ministry of Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics, School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080, and Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143.
J Neurosci. 2014 Apr 16;34(16):5406-15. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5310-13.2014.
It has previously been shown that environmental enrichment can enhance structural plasticity in the brain and thereby improve cognitive and behavioral function. In this study, we reared developmentally noise-exposed rats in an acoustic-enriched environment for ∼4 weeks to investigate whether or not enrichment could restore developmentally degraded behavioral and neuronal processing of sound frequency. We found that noise-exposed rats had significantly elevated sound frequency discrimination thresholds compared with age-matched naive rats. Environmental acoustic enrichment nearly restored to normal the behavioral deficit resulting from early disrupted acoustic inputs. Signs of both degraded frequency selectivity of neurons as measured by the bandwidth of frequency tuning curves and decreased long-term potentiation of field potentials recorded in the primary auditory cortex of these noise-exposed rats also were reversed partially. The observed behavioral and physiological effects induced by enrichment were accompanied by recovery of cortical expressions of certain NMDA and GABAA receptor subunits and brain-derived neurotrophic factor. These studies in a rodent model show that environmental acoustic enrichment promotes recovery from early noise-induced auditory cortical dysfunction and indicate a therapeutic potential of this noninvasive approach for normalizing neurological function from pathologies that cause hearing and associated language impairments in older children and adults.
先前的研究表明，环境丰富可以增强大脑的结构可塑性，从而改善认知和行为功能。在这项研究中，我们将发育性噪声暴露的大鼠饲养在声环境丰富的环境中约 4 周，以研究丰富环境是否可以恢复发育性受损的声音频率的行为和神经元处理。我们发现，与年龄匹配的对照组相比，噪声暴露的大鼠的声音频率辨别阈显著升高。环境声丰富几乎恢复了早期受损的声输入导致的行为缺陷。这些噪声暴露大鼠初级听皮层中神经元频率调谐曲线带宽和场电位长时程增强的频率选择性降低的迹象也部分逆转。富集引起的观察到的行为和生理效应伴随着某些 NMDA 和 GABA A 受体亚基和脑源性神经营养因子在皮质表达的恢复。在啮齿动物模型中的这些研究表明，环境声丰富促进了早期噪声诱导的听觉皮层功能障碍的恢复，并表明这种非侵入性方法具有治疗潜力，可以使因听力和相关语言障碍而导致的年龄较大的儿童和成人的神经功能正常化。
