Prenatal cocaine effects on fear conditioning: exaggeration of sex-dependent context extinction

Prenatal cocaine exposure results in deficits in sensory preconditioning, discrimination reversal, and spatial navigation, tasks that require input from the hippocampus. However, there are no previous studies concerning prenatal cocaine effects on contextual fear conditioning, another hippocampal-dependent task. The present experiments tested whether chronic subcutaneous administration of 40 mg/kg of cocaine HCl to pregnant rats, from gestational day (GD) 8 through 20 would lead to disruption of contextual fear conditioning in adult male and female offspring. Offspring of saline-injected/pair-fed and untreated dams served as controls. Experiment 1 used a one-trial context conditioning preparation. Rats received a 2-s, 1-mA footshock in either the test context or a novel context, or received no shock on the day prior to the no-shock test. Defecation and freezing were measures of fear. Experiment 2 used a multiple measures protocol to optimize detection of prenatal treatment effects and was preceded by an open-field test. Rats received a 2-s, 0.8-mA footshock or no shock once daily over 4 days of conditioning. During 3 days of extinction, access to an adjacent chamber enabled the observation of four additional measures of fear: side crossing, latency, nose crossing, and side-differential. There were gender-dependent effects of conditioning on freezing and the four added measures of fear. Males showed higher levels of context conditioning and extinguished more slowly than females. The measures of nose crossing and side-differential revealed that prenatal cocaine exposure exaggerated gender-specific effects of context conditioning. The effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on context extinction are sexually dimorphic.