Although tricyclic antidepressants rapidly activate monoaminergic neurotransmission, these drugs must be administered chronically to alleviate symptoms of depression. This observation suggests that molecular mechanisms downstream of monoamine receptor activation, which include the induction of gene transcription, underlie chronic antidepressant-induced changes in behavior. Here we show that met...

To the Editors: In their review, Brooks-Kayal et al. (2013) provided guidelines for using certain assays to study epilepsy-associated depression in the laboratory. These guidelines should be further refined so as to improve construct validity of models in question, throughput of preclinical trials, and the reliability of the findings. 1 The authors propose the Porsolt test to study the inabilit...

Death-feigning, also called tonic immobility, is found in a number of animal species across vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. To date, five hypotheses have been proposed for the adaptive significance of tonic immobility. These are that tonic immobility is effective for prey because (i) avoiding dead prey is safer for predators, (ii) immobility plays a role in physical defence, (iii) immobility ...

The effects of a bilateral electrolytical lesion of the CEA on the behavioral and sympathetically induced cardiac response in the shock-probe/defensive-burying test have been analyzed in male Wistar rats. Lesions in the CEA failed to affect defensive burying and accompanying tachycardiac response as compared to sham-lesioned controls during the presentation of the electrified shock probe (uncon...

Background & Aims: Today, due to the modern industrial life of human beings, stress has become prevalent among them and they will suffer from its complications. Exposure to stress during pregnancy can change many babies' normal physiological processes. The separate and combined effects of three common types of prenatal stress were investigated on motor learning of male offspring of rats. Method...

Effects of co-administration with the 5-HT(2) receptor antagonist LY 53857 and the antidepressant mianserin on immobility time in the forced swimming test were investigated in mice. Mianserin did not affect the immobility time at ranges from 1-10 mg/kg, although it elicited anti-immobility effects at 20 mg/kg. Co-administration of the 5-HT(2) receptor antagonist LY 53857 and a subactive dose of...

Transient receptor potential canonical (TRPC) channels are widely expressed in brain and involved in various aspects of brain function. Both TRPC4 and TRPC5 have been implicated in innate fear function, which represents a key response to environmental stress. However, to what extent the TRPC4/C5 channels are involved in psychiatric disorders remains unexplored. Here, we tested the antidepressan...

Chronic psychological and social stress can cause psychiatric disorders in humans. In this study, we analyzed the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade in the hippocampus of chronically socially defeated rats. The rats that were subjected to social defeat every day for 5 weeks showed physiological and behavioral changes, including a reduced rate of weight gain, enlarged adrenal glands...

OBJECTIVE Peritraumatic reactions feature prominently among the main predictors for development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Peritraumatic tonic immobility (PTI), a less investigated but equally important type of peritraumatic response, has been recently attracting the attention of researchers and clinicians for its close association with traumatic reactions and PTSD. Our objective ...

Agmatine has been recently emerged as a novel candidate to assist the conventional pharmacotherapy of depression. The acute restraint stress (ARS) is an unavoidable stress situation that may cause depressive-like behavior in rodents. In this study, we investigated the potential antidepressant-like effect of agmatine (10mg/kg, administered acutely by oral route) in the forced swimming test (FST)...