Cognitive decline is apparent in the early stages of Huntington's disease and progressively worsens throughout the course of the disease. Expression of the human Huntington's disease mutation in mice (R6/2 line) causes a progressive neurological phenotype with motor symptoms resembling those seen in Huntington's disease. Here we describe the cognitive performance of R6/2 mice using four different tests (Morris water maze, visual cliff avoidance, two-choice swim tank, and T-maze). Behavioral testing was performed on R6/2 transgenic mice and their wild-type littermates between 3 and 14.5 weeks of age, using separate groups of mice for each test. R6/2 mice did not show an overt motor phenotype until ∼8 weeks of age. However, between 3.5 and 8 weeks of age, R6/2 mice displayed progressive deterioration in specific aspects of learning in the Morris water maze, visual cliff, two-choice swim tank, and T-maze tasks. The age of onset and progression of the deficits in the individual tasks differed depending on the particular task demands. Thus, as seen in humans with Huntington's disease, R6/2 mice develop progressive learning impairments on cognitive tasks sensitive to frontostriatal and hippocampal function. We suggest that R6/2 mice provide not only a model for studying cognitive and motor changes in trinucleotide repeat disorders, but also a framework within which the functional efficacy of therapeutic strategies aimed at treating such diseases can be tested.

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Brain dynamic changes associated with schizophrenia are largely equivocal, with interpretation complicated by many factors, such as the presence of therapeutic agents and the complex nature of the syndrome itself. Evidence for a brain-wide change in individual network oscillations, shared by all patients, is largely equivocal, but stronger for lower (delta) than for higher (gamma) bands. However, region-specific changes in rhythms across multiple, interdependent, nested frequencies may correlate better with pathology. Changes in synaptic excitation and inhibition in schizophrenia disrupt delta rhythm-mediated cortico-cortical communication, while enhancing thalamo-cortical communication in this frequency band. The contrasting relationships between delta and higher frequencies in thalamus and cortex generate frequency mismatches in inter-regional connectivity, leading to a disruption in temporal communication between higher-order brain regions associated with mental time travel.

Previously, we showed that NMDA antagonists enhance high-frequency oscillations (130-180 Hz) in the nucleus accumbens. However, whether NMDA antagonists can enhance high-frequency oscillations in other brain regions remains unclear. Here, we used monopolar, bipolar and inverse current source density techniques to examine oscillatory activity in the hippocampus, a region known to generate spontaneous ripples (∼200 Hz), its surrounding tissue, and the dorsal striatum, neuroanatomically related to the nucleus accumbens. In monopolar recordings, ketamine-induced increases in the power of high-frequency oscillations were detected in all structures, although the power was always substantially larger in the nucleus accumbens. In bipolar recordings, considered to remove common-mode input, high-frequency oscillations associated with ketamine injection were not present in the regions we investigated outside the nucleus accumbens. In line with this, inverse current source density showed the greatest changes in current to occur in the vicinity of the nucleus accumbens and a monopolar structure of the generator. We found little spatial localisation of ketamine high-frequency oscillations in other areas. In contrast, sharp-wave ripples, which were well localized to the hippocampus, occurred less frequently after ketamine. Notably, we also found ketamine produced small, but significant, changes in the power of 30-90 Hz gamma oscillations (an increase in the hippocampus and a decrease in the nucleus accumbens).