Castro C A, Rudy J W
Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder 80309.
Behav Neural Biol. 1993 Nov;60(3):282-5. doi: 10.1016/0163-1047(93)90580-b.
Early-life undernutrition impairs the short-term memory capacity of adult rats (90 days of age) trained on a conditional-spatial discrimination task (Castro, Tracy, & Rudy, Behavioral Brain Research, 32, 255-264, 1989). While well-nourished control animals perform above 90% correct when the interval separating the forced run and choice run is 180 s, the performance of the undernourished animals falls to chance (50%) when the delay interval is increased to 90 s. We now report that this performance decrement can be attenuated by the administration of the anticholinesterase, physostigmine. However, the effects of physostigmine were dose dependent. While 0.02 mg/kg of physostigmine improved the performance of the undernourished animals so that they performed significantly above chance at the 180-s delay interval, neither 0.2 nor 0.002 mg/kg of physostigmine improved performance. We concluded that this effect was centrally mediated since scopolamine hydrobromide (1.0 mg/kg) which blocks both central and peripheral cholinergic receptors blocked physostigmine's performance-improving effect, while methyl-scopolamine (1.0 mg/kg) which blocks only peripheral receptors did not. These are the first results which suggest that the short-term memory impairments produced by early-life undernutrition can be attenuated by enhancing central cholinergic functioning.
早年营养不良会损害成年大鼠（90日龄）在条件空间辨别任务中的短期记忆能力（Castro、Tracy和Rudy，《行为脑研究》，第32卷，第255 - 264页，1989年）。当强制奔跑和选择奔跑之间的间隔为180秒时，营养良好的对照动物的正确表现率高于90%，而当延迟间隔增加到90秒时，营养不良动物的表现则降至随机水平（50%）。我们现在报告，给予抗胆碱酯酶药物毒扁豆碱可以减轻这种表现下降。然而，毒扁豆碱的作用是剂量依赖性的。虽然0.02毫克/千克的毒扁豆碱改善了营养不良动物的表现，使其在180秒延迟间隔时的表现显著高于随机水平，但0.2毫克/千克和0.002毫克/千克的毒扁豆碱均未改善表现。我们得出结论，这种作用是由中枢介导的，因为阻断中枢和外周胆碱能受体的氢溴酸东莨菪碱（1.0毫克/千克）阻断了毒扁豆碱的表现改善作用，而仅阻断外周受体的甲基东莨菪碱（1.0毫克/千克）则没有。这些是首批结果，表明早年营养不良导致的短期记忆损伤可以通过增强中枢胆碱能功能来减轻。
