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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia affecting the elderly population today; however, there is currently no accurate description of the etiology of this devastating disorder. No single factor theory has been demonstrated as being causative; however, an alternative theory suggests that the interaction of multiple risk factors is responsible for AD. In this thesis I present data suggesting a neuroprotective role for acetylcholine during aging. Using a rat model of cholinergic depletion of the medial septum, I explored the effects of four common risk factors for AD (stress, seizures, stroke and circadian dysfunction) targeted at the hippocampus and examined the effects on measures of hippocampal dependent (water maze) and hippocampal independent (fear conditioning) memory. Here, I propose a role for acetylcholinemediated compensatory mechanisms in the functional recovery observed following sub threshold insults similar to those commonly observed in the elderly. m First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Robert McDonald. Thank you for your support and encouragement, and for allowing me the independence to pursue my own projects and to learn from my experiences. I would also like to thank Nhung Hong for doing the majority of the cholinergic depletion and stroke surgeries used in this thesis and for teaching me the techniques. I would like to give a huge thank you to Joelle Kopp who was an invaluable asset who assisted in histology and spent many hours on the microscope counting cholinergic neurons. I would also like to thank Dr. Christine Werk for patiently reading and re-reading early drafts of my papers and this thesis and Dr.Hugo Lehmann for all his help in running statistics and interpreting my data. In addition, many thanks go out to Courtney Lamb, Robert Court and Arthur Verhoef for helping me with histology and behavioural testing, to Keri Colwell for running the corticosterone assays, the Metz lab for kindly allowing me the use of their microscope and to Karen Dow-Cazel and the rest of the animal care staff for taking care of my rats and helping me set up the circadian experiements. The cholinergic hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease 6 Acknowledgements IVThe basal forebrain cholinergic system 8The role of the basal forebrain cholinergic system in learning and memory 10The current state of the cholinergic hypothesis of Alzhimer's disease 15Risk factors for Alzheimer's disease 16Multiple combinations of co-factors theory of Alzheimer's disease 22The role of the hippocampus in learning and memory 24Objective of the present thesis 25Chapter 2: A series of pilot studies to determine the threshold for behaviourally sub threshold stroke, seizures and stress 28Abstract 29Experiment la: The effect of a chronic variable stress schedule on performance of the water maze task 32 Materials and Methods 33Results 36Experiment lb: The effects of a variable restraint stress procedure on levels of blood borne CORT 39 Materials and Methods 39Results 40Discussion 41Experiment 2: T...

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Recent evidence suggests that N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-receptor mediated plasticity in hippocampus has a more subtle role in memory-based behaviours than originally thought. One idea is that NMDA-based plasticity is essential for the consolidation of post-training memory but not for the initial encoding or for short-term memory. To further test this idea we used a three-phase variant of the hidden goal water maze task. In the first phase, rats were pre-trained to an initial location. Next, intense, massed training was done in a 2-h interval to teach the rats to go to a new location after either an injection of the NMDA receptor antagonist (6)-3-(2-carboxypiperazin-4-yl)propyl-1-phosphonic acid (CPP) or of vehicle. Finally, under drug-free conditions 24 h after new location training, a competition test was done between the original and new locations. We find that N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-receptor blockade has little or no effect on new location training. In contrast, when tested 24 h later, the strength of the trace for the new location learned during NMDA-receptor blockade was much weaker compared with the trace for the new location learned after saline injection. Further experiments showed similar effects when NMDA-receptors were blocked immediately after the new location training, suggesting that this is a memory consolidation effect. Our results therefore reinforce the notion that hippocampal NMDA-receptors participate in post-training memory consolidation but are not essential for the processes necessary to learn or retain navigational information in the short term.

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This research examined the roles played by the ventromedial orbital prefrontal cortex (OPFC) and the infralimbic/prelimbic prefrontal cortex (I/P PFC) during discriminative fear conditioning. The first experiment included nine rats with bilateral lesions to the I/P PFC, an additional nine with OPFC lesions, and eight sham lesion controls. Behavioural analysis was conducted using a discriminative fear conditioning to context task 10 days after surgery. Results indicate that lesions to ventromedial orbital prefrontal cortex result in generalized fear and impaired extinction. In contrast, infralimbic/prelimbic cortical lesioned animals exhibit appropriate fear response patterns and extinction, but show a specific impairment in spontaneous recovery. To ascertain why I/P PFC lesion rats did not exhibit spontaneous recovery, a second experiment was conducted. All procedures in the second experiment were identical to the first except a decay period was employed in place of extinction training. Results from the second experiment indicate that the difficulty retrieving the extinguished association is related to extinction processes and not decay. Taken together, these findings suggest that OPFC and I/P PFC have distinct roles in associative processes necessary for discriminative fear conditioning, extinction, and spontaneous recovery. These results further implicate OPFC and I/P PFC in the pathology underlying generalized anxiety disorder.

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