Spatial Memory Using Active Allothetic Place Avoidance in Adult Rats After Isoflurane Anesthesia

Abstract

Control animals demonstrated increased active avoidance behavior in the AAPA task compared with isoflurane-treated animals. Animals exposed to 2-hour isoflurane general anesthetic had a reduction in the maximum path of avoidance measure up to 7 days postanesthesia, whereas gross spatial parameters such as number of entrances into the shock zone were not significantly different between groups. The AAPA model may prove useful in ascertaining the learning and memory deficits of postoperative cognitive dysfunction.

Nogo-A-deficient Transgenic Rats Show Deficits in Higher Cognitive Functions, Decreased Anxiety, and Altered Circadian Activity Patterns

“…This behavior has been noted in healthy Sprague-Dawley rats in an active place avoidance task before (the “poor learners” in Carr et al, 2011). As immobile animals are incapable of solving the task, regardless of their cognitive abilities, such animals had to be removed from the analysis.…”

The ventral hippocampus is involved in multi‐goal obstacle‐rich spatial navigation

“…It has been reported that isoflurane anesthesia could produce cognitive impairments in human and rodents. However, these impairments were observed with longer exposures (>2 hr) than those used here (<15 min), and were controlled for here using saline injections (Callaway, Jones, & Royse, ; Carr, Torjman, Manu, Dy, & Goldberg, ).…”

Recovery of Consciousness and Cognition after General Anesthesia in Humans

“…The rapid recovery of cortical dynamics just prior to recovering consciousness, the restored accuracy of executive function and multiple cognitive functions within three hours of emergence, and the normal sleepwake patterns in the days following the experiment provide compelling evidence that the healthy brain is resilient to the effects of even deep general anesthesia. The findings also suggest that the immediate and persistent cognitive dysfunction identified after general anesthesia in healthy animals (Culley et al, 2004;Valentim et al, 2008;Carr et al, 2011;Callaway et al, 2012;Zurek et al, 2012;Jevtovic-Todorovic et al, 2013;Zurek et al, 2014;Jiang et al, 2017) does not necessarily translate to healthy humans and that postoperative neurocognitive disorders might relate to factors other than general anesthesia, such as surgery or patient comorbidity (Krause et al, 2019;Wildes et al, 2019).…”

“…General anesthesia, by contrast, represents one controlled and reproducible method by which to perturb consciousness and cognition, followed by systematic observations of the recovery process. Studying recovery of cognition after general anesthesia in humans is also of particular importance in humans because animal studies have suggested that general anesthetics have the potential to immediately and persistently impair cognition in the post-anesthetic period (Culley et al, 2004;Valentim et al, 2008;Carr et al, 2011;Callaway et al, 2012;Zurek et al, 2012;Jevtovic-Todorovic et al, 2013;Zurek et al, 2014;Avidan and Evers, 2016;Jiang et al, 2017), creating a potential public health concern for the hundreds of millions of surgical patients undergoing general anesthesia each year (Weiser et al, 2015).…”