Effects of cocaine base paste on anxiety-like behavior and immediate-early gene expression in nucleus accumbens and medial prefrontal cortex of female mice

Abstract

Cocaine base paste (CBP) is an illegal drug of abuse usually consumed by adolescents in a socio-economically vulnerable situation. Repeated drug use targets key brain circuits disrupting the processes that underlie emotions and cognition. At the basis of such neuroadaptations lie changes in the expression of immediate-early genes (IEGs). Nevertheless, changes in transcriptional regulation associated with CBP consumption remain unknown. We aimed to describe behavioral phenotype related to locomotion, anxiety-like behavior, and memory of CBP-injected mice and to study IEGs expression after an abstinence period. Five-week-old female CF-1 mice were i.p. injected daily with vehicle or CBP (40mg/kg) for 10days and subjected to a 10-day period of abstinence. Open field and novel object recognition tests were used to evaluate locomotion and anxiety-like behaviors and recognition memory, respectively, during chronic administration and after abstinence. After abstinence, prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and nucleus accumbens (NAc) were isolated and gene expression analysis performed through real-time PCR. We found an increase in locomotion and anxiety-like behavior during CBP administration and after the abstinence period. Furthermore, the CBP group showed impaired recognition memory after abstinence. Egr1, FosB, ΔFosB, Arc, Bdnf, and TrkB expression was upregulated in CBP-injected mice in NAc and FosB, ΔFosB, Arc, and Npas4 expression was downregulated in mPFC. We generated an anxiety score and found positive and negative correlations with IEGs expression in NAc and mPFC, respectively. Our results suggest that chronic CBP exposure induced alterations in anxiety-like behavior and recognition memory. These changes were accompanied by altered IEGs expression.