Prenatal intravenous cocaine and the heart rate-orienting response: a dose-response study

Attentional dysfunction is a persistent behavioral abnormality that is emerging as one of the cardinal features in the investigations of the teratogenic effects of cocaine in humans and rodents. The present study sought to extend this work by using a dose-response design with an alternate strain of rat. Virgin Long-Evans female rats, implanted with an IV access port prior to breeding were administered saline, 0.5, 1.0, or 3.0 mg/kg of cocaine HCl from gestational day (GD) GD8-21 (1x per day-GD8-14, 2x per day-GD15-21). Cocaine had no significant effect on maternal or litter parameters. At 14-15 days of age, 1 male and 1 female from each litter were tested to evaluate the heart rate orienting response (HR-OR). Following 20 min for acclimation, pups were presented an olfactory stimulus for 20s per trial, across four trials, and with an intertrial interval of 2 min. The initial baseline HR was not significantly different across the treatment groups, although cocaine did alter the stability of the QRS complex duration. The magnitude of the HR-OR averaged across trials increased as a linear function of dosage of cocaine. A more complex (quadratic) interaction between cocaine dose and sex of the offspring was also noted. When examined across trials, the controls failed to display any significant within-session variation in the HR-OR; in contrast all of the prenatal cocaine treated groups displayed either sensitization (low and high dose) or habituation of the response (middle dose). Analysis of the peak HR-OR confirmed that the controls were indeed displaying the response on at least one trial of the session, albeit not consistently on any specific trial. The more vigorous HR-OR of the prenatal cocaine groups, relative to vehicle controls, most likely reflects an alteration in development of the neural basis of response; as previously shown, the most vigorous response to the olfactory stimulus is seen early (12 days of age) and progressively decreases across the preweaning period. In sum, prenatal exposure to cocaine, at least when administered by the IV route, provides reproducible alterations in attentional processes, as indexed by the noradrenergically-mediated HR-OR. The documentation of a linear dose-response function suggests that there is likely no threshold for the drug-induced alteration. Moreover, the sex of the animal also appears to play some role in the nature of the expression of the altered HR-OR.