Toward an animal model of extinction-induced despair: focus on aging and physiological indices

Behaviors that are under the control of positive or negative reinforcers undergo extinction when the anticipated reward/reinforcer is withheld. Despair, an important symptom of environmentally determined depression in humans, can be generated by extinction, or the failure of expected reward to accrue. Although well known to clinicians dealing with depressive patients, an animal model has not been available for extinction-induced depression. We have made a beginning towards validating such a model, based on the extinction of negatively reinforced behavior in the rat, i.e., upon removal of the possibility to escape onto a safety platform in the water maze. As a marker for despair, we employed behavioral immobility, i.e., the cessation of swimming in the attempt to find safety from the water, presumably, a type of learned helplessness. This measure was sensitive to antidepressants and correlated with neurotransmitter contents, neurotrophins and hypothalamus-pituitary adrenal axis markers in selected sites of the brain. Given that some cases of depression in the elderly may be biologically distinct from others and from early-onset depression, and since particularly the aged are prone to experience extinction-induced despair, we compared aged (ca. 24 months old) animals with adults in most of our studies. We found a number of distinct differences in behavioral and biological measures, indicative of differences in propensity to, as well as response to, extinction-induced despair between aged and adults. Our results add to the body of evidence for differences in the neurobiological substrates of depressive disorders between aged and adults, with the implication for the requirement of different treatment strategies in these two populations.