Effects of swimming exercise on the extinction of fear memory in rats

Abstract

We investigated the relation between swimming exercise and fear memory extinction. Rats that performed regular swimming exercise over six weeks underwent a fear conditioning. Twenty-eight days later, they were submitted to extinction tests. Swimming rats had enhanced extinction process throughout the 5 days of the extinction test when compared to sedentary ones (Exercise vs. Fear Conditioning vs. Test days interaction effect. This suggests that the swimming exercise accelerated the process of aversive memory extinction, reducing the expression of conditioned fear behavior. These results encourage further studies addressing the anxiolytic effects of exercise, with potential implications for anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Brain and Cognition for Addiction Medicine: From Prevention to Recovery Neural Substrates for Treatment of Psychostimulant-Induced Cognitive Deficits

“…Consistent with these findings, exercise using a treadmill attenuated morphine withdrawal-induced memory deficit in rats (297). Also, exercise facilitated extinction of fear-associated memories (298, 299). However, it is not known if exercise facilitates extinction of psychostimulant-associated drug memories.…”

Recent Advances in the Understanding of Specific Efferent Pathways Emerging From the Cerebellum

“…Alternatively, because the parabrachial nucleus receives projections directly from PCs and indirectly through the FN ( Hashimoto et al, 2018 ), and projects to the amygdala ( Saper and Loewy, 1980 ; Jhamandas et al, 1996 ; Cai et al, 2018 ), the efferent pathways to the amygdala might be mediated via the parabrachial nucleus. Considering the potential of motor training as a therapy for abnormal fear responses ( Faria et al, 2018 ; Tanner et al, 2018 ), the cerebellar-amygdala pathways may be worthy of further investigation.…”

Neurobiological effects of forced swim exercise on the rodent hippocampus: a systematic review

“…Among the main findings, 42 articles analyzed behavior aspects and in 23.8% of them the subjects had better performance in spatial memory tests better performance in spatial memory tests (Teixeira et al, 2011;Drumond et al, 2012;Kim et al, 2013;Cechella et al, 2014a;2014c;Diegues et al, 2014;Dief et al, 2015;dos Santos et al, 2018;Belviranlı and Okudan, 2019;Feizolahi et al, 2019), 23.8% better results in short-and long-term memory tests (Drumond et al, 2012;Kim et al, 2012;Alomari et al, 2013;Khabour et al, 2013;Souza et al, 2013;Cechella et al, 2014a;2014c;2014b;Jin et al, 2014;Marcelino et al, 2016), in 21.4% anxiolytic-like activity (Liu et al, 2010;Teixeira et al, 2011;Dief et al, 2015;Ozbeyli et al, 2015;Zhong et al, 2016;Selakovic et al, 2017;Souza et al, 2017;Faria et al, 2018;Joksimovic et al, 2019), 9.5% reduction in depressive-like behavior (Sigwalt et al, 2011;Joksimovic et al, 2017b;Souza et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2018), 7.1% of learning improvement and general cognitive features associated with the hippocampus (Basha and Sujitha, 2012;Alomari et al, 2013;Khabour et al, 2013). However, some studies reported opposite reactions (4.7%) (Nik...…”