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Updated: Sep 19, 2026
The Use of Trace Eyeblink Classical Conditioning to Assess Hippocampal Dysfunction in a Rat Model of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
Published on: August 5, 2017
Selective Impairment of Spatial Recognition Memory and Reduced Frontal Corticothalamic Spine Density Following
Grace Qian1, Hannah Jarrell1, Faith Maxwell1
1Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, LSU Health-New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.
Background:
Heavy alcohol use is common during adolescence and is associated with an increased risk of alcohol use disorder and prevalence of residual cognitive deficits, especially in behaviors associated with the latently developing prefrontal cortex (PFC). A major need for advancing our understanding of this relationship is accessible preclinical behavioral batteries that can be used to disassociate the effects of adolescent alcohol on select PFC circuits.
Methods:
The present study uses a retrograde viral approach to identify PFC projection neurons to the mediodorsal thalamus (MdT), followed by intermittent access to alcohol (IA EtOH) during adolescence on the 2-bottle choice procedure to model voluntary alcohol consumption. Following adolescent IA EtOH or water control, we evaluated performance on a battery of tasks to assess anxiety and cognition. Last, morphological analyses of spine density were performed for PFC-MdT neurons of adolescent IA EtOH and water control mice.
Results:
Our results indicate that compared to water-only controls, male and female mice that voluntarily consumed alcohol during adolescence demonstrate performance deficits in the object-in-place recognition task, without affecting the novel object recognition task, Y-maze alternation, anxiety-like behavior, or locomotion, an outcome consistent with PFC and MdT dysfunction. Morphological assessment of PFC neurons from male and female mice following behavioral tasks found a reduction in spine density in basal and apical, but not oblique dendrites of PFC-MdT neurons.
Conclusions:
Collectively, these results implicate PFC-to-MdT circuit integrity as a potential substrate for the effects of adolescent alcohol on spatial recognition memory.
