BEHAVIORAL EFFECTS OF VOLUNTARY INTERMITTENT ALCOHOL INTAKE IN MALE AND FEMALE ADOLESCENT RATS

MOLINA, SJ; BUJÁN GE; GUELMAN, LR; SERRA, HA

Córdoba

Congreso; IX International Meeting of the Latin American Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism (LASBRA): Determinants of Alcoholism: bridging the gap between epidemiologic and basic research?.; 2019

Latin American Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism (LASBRA)

Adolescence is a critical period in the maturation of the Central Nervous System, in which changes occur at the biochemical level and in neurotransmission, which underlie the appearance of different behavioral characteristics. Since alcohol consumption and noise exposure are common activities frequently performed by human adolescents, the use of an animal model could provide data to reach clinically relevant information. Consequently, the objective of the present work was to evaluate whether both agents, present alternately, were capable of producing changes in different behavioral parameters, both in females and males adolescent rats. 28-day-old animals (early adolescence in the rat) were exposed to voluntary alcohol consumption, for intermittent periods of 24 hours for a week (days 28, 30, 32 and 34). The next day of alcohol consumption, they were exposure noise (95-97 dB) or a single session, for 2 hours on day 35.Immediately after the noise, different behavioral tasks were evaluated.The results showed that noise was able to decrease associative memory and increase anxiety like behaviors in male animals, while those who drank alcohol showed the opposite. When alcohol was present the previous week, these changes were not observed. In contrast, females exposed to noise or alcohol showed a decrease in associative memory and an increase in anxiety like behaviors that remained even when the rats were exposed to both agents. Finally, although both sexes ingested the same amount of alcohol initially (in g / kg), the females consumed twice as much as the males. In conclusion, these results suggest that, although adolescent males and females would be equally vulnerable to the behavioral effects of noise, the latter would appear to be more sensitive when alcohol preceded exposure to noise. It could be hypothesized that the compensation of damage observed only in males would be due to the lower amount of alcohol ingested compared to females.