Chronic Oral Pelargonidin Alleviates Learning and Memory Disturbances in Streptozotocin-Diabetic Rats

Diabetes mellitus is accompanied with disturbances in learning, memory, and cognitive skills in the humans and experimental animals. Due to the anti-diabetic and antioxidant activity of pelargonidin (PG), this research study was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of chronic oral PG on alleviating learning and memory disturbance in streptozotocin-diabetic rats. Male Wistar rats were divided into control, diabetic, PG-treated control and PG (single- and/or multiple-dose)-treated diabetic groups. PG was administered p.o. once at a dose of 10 mg/kg and/or multiple doses on alternate days for 8 weeks. For induction of diabetes, streptozotocin (STZ) was injected IP in a single dose of 60 mg/kg. For the evaluation of learning and memory, initial latency (IL) and step-through latency (STL) were determined at the end of study using a passive avoidance test. Meanwhile, spatial memory was assessed in a Y-maze task. It was found that the alternation score of the diabetic rats was lower than the control (p < 0.05) and that single dose PG-treated diabetic rats (p < 0.05) showed a higher alternation score in comparison with the diabetic group. Regarding initial latency, there was no significant difference among the groups. In addition, diabetic and single-dose PG-treated diabetic rats developed a significant impairment in retention and recall in the passive avoidance test (p < 0.01), as was evident by a lower STL. Furthermore, the retention and recall of multiple-dose PG-treated diabetic rats was significantly higher in comparison with diabetic rats (p < 0.05). Therefore, it can be concluded that single-dose oral PG may attenuate spatial memory in the Y maze paradigm and multiple-dose chronic PG could improve retention and recall capability in the passive avoidance test in STZ-diabetic rats.