Neurotoxic lesions of nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM) in rats cause depletion of acetylcholine (ACh) in neocortex (Ncx) and deficits in passive avoidance (PA) behavior. Such deficits in behavior can be used to evaluate treatments designed to promote functional recovery. Because cultured astrocytes produce, store and release trophic factors known to enhance the rescue of damaged neurons, t...

Previously, we demonstrated that plasticity of frontal cortex is altered in aging rats: 3 months after surgery, excitotoxic lesions of the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM) produce larger declines in dendritic morphology in frontal cortex of aged rats relative to young adults. To determine whether the differential effect of the lesion was due specifically to loss of cholinergic input from t...

BACKGROUND Fluorine-18 fluoroethoxybenzovesamicol ([18F]FEOBV) is a radioligand for the selective imaging of the vesicular acetylcholine transporter with positron emission tomography (PET). The current study demonstrates that pathological cortical cholinergic deafferentation can be quantified in vivo with [18F]FEOBV PET, yielding analogous results to postmortem histological techniques. METHOD...

Cholinergic neurons of the forebrain respond trophically to nerve growth factor (NGF) in some experimental circumstances. The cholinergic cell system of the nucleus basalis magnocellularis (NBM) which projects to the cortex shows signs of cellular degeneration following limited devascularizing cortical lesions, while no apparent damage is observed in the remaining ipsilateral cortex. These chol...

Two experiments examined the effects of reductions in cortical cholinergic function on performance of a novel task that allowed for the simultaneous assessment of attention to a visual stimulus and memory for that stimulus over a variable delay within the same test session. In the first experiment, infusions of the muscarinic receptor antagonist scopolamine into the medial prefrontal cortex (mP...

Sensory processing in the cortex should integrate inputs arriving from receptive fields located on both sides of the body. This role could be played by the corpus callosum through precise projections between both hemispheres. However, different studies suggest that cholinergic projections from the basal forebrain (BF) could also contribute to the synchronization and integration of cortical acti...

Introduction: Memantine (MEM) is a noncompetitive N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) antagonist clinically used for the treatment of Alzheimer disease (AD) in mild to severe conditions. The present study was conducted to investigate the effects of memantine on the spontaneous firing frequency of CA1 pyramidal neurons in rats caused by an electrical lesion of Nucleus Basalis Magnocellularis (...

The pattern and distribution of the cortical projections from intermediate parts of the cholinergic basal magnocellular nucleus were studied by anterogradely transported Phaseolus vulgaris-leucoagglutinin. This immunocytochemical tracing technique reveals the detailed morphology and distribution of efferents from this intermediate area in the nucleus basalis to the various areas and layers of c...

Cholinergic systems are thought to play a role in memory. It has been suggested that cholinergic neurons, possibly the cortically projecting cells of the nucleus basalis magnocellularis, are differentially involved in working and reference memory. To evaluate this hypothesis the effects on memory of scopolamine (0, 0.3, 0.6 mg/kg) or unilateral kainic acid (4.7 nmoles in 1 microliter) lesions o...

The binding problem refers to the fundamental challenge of the CNS to integrate sensory information registered by distinct brain regions to form a unified neural representation of a stimulus. Although the human cognitive literature has established that attentional processes in frontoparietal cortices support feature binding, the neurochemical and specific downstream neuroanatomical contribution...