Effects of ascorbic acid combined to environmental enrichment on anxiety and memory.

Abstract

Ascorbic acid (AA; vitamin C) is an important antioxidant that is directly involved in regulating physiological and psychological systems such as anxiety, memory, depression, stress, and emotional mood states. Environmental enrichment (EE) studies in animals have shown improvements in anxiety and memory as measured by behavioral experiments from living in improved settings. In the present study, the influences of AA and enriched environments were explored in 13-month-old rats, considered middle-aged, half of which were housed for up to 13 months in an enriched environment with a rich diversity of objects to explore, while the other half was maintained in a standard environment with only water and food, to understand better their independent and combined benefits to improving anxiety and memory. The rats were administered either a saline solution or AA (100 mg/kg, orally [p.o.]) 1 hr before being tested on the elevated plus maze (EPM) and the Morris water maze (MWM) behavioral tests. AA reduced anxiety-like behavior and improved spatial memory relative to saline-treated control rats. EE increased the number of entries to the open arms (anxiolytic-like behavior) and improved spatial memory retention. EE potentiated the anxiolytic-like effect of AA. These findings provide additional evidence that AA might play an important psychological therapeutic role as adjunctive psychopharmacotherapy in reducing levels of anxiety and memory deficits in human subjects.

Effects of Chronic Secondhand Smoke (SHS) Exposure on Cognitive Performance and Metabolic Pathways in the Hippocampus of Wild-Type and Human Tau Mice

“…Regression analysis in WT males revealed that hippocampal ascorbate, FAD, and PA might mediate spatial memory retention in the second probe trial (72 h after the last hidden-platform training). This result is consistent with the antioxidant properties of ascorbate, the proposed vitamin C depletion caused by environmental smoking (Preston et al 2003), and the relationship of ascorbate with spatial memory in the water maze (de Oliveira et al 2019).…”