Environmental enrichment improves cognitive deficits in Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats (SHR): Relevance for Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

摘要: The interaction between genes and environment seems to be relevant for the development of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), one most prevalent childhood psychiatric diseases. occurrence ADHD is typically associated with poor academic performance, probably reflecting learning difficulties and/or cognitive impulsiveness. inbred Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats (SHR) strain has often been considered as an animal model ADHD, since they 'naturally' display main symptomatology. Although pharmacological agents improve SHR's deficits, little known about involvement environmental factors in SHR disabilities what extent 'protective' non-pharmacological may strategy prevention. Here we investigated whether rearing during neurodevelopment counteract later deficits presented by adult SHR. Wistar (WIS) rats were also used investigate putative effects enrichment depend on a specific genetic background. animals reared enriched (EE) or standard (SE) from post-natal day 21 until 3 months age (adulthood) tested non-cognitive phenotypes. EE improved performance open field habituation, water maze spatial reference, social object recognition tasks, while traits, such nociception hypertension, not affected EE. Response WIS was generally present These results show that general low strongly depends suggest modifications familial preventive cope ADHD.