Abstract
The immune system plays a role in the maintenance of healthy neurocognitive function. Different patterns of immune response triggered by distinct stimuli may affect nervous functions through regulatory or deregulatory signals, depending on the properties of the exogenous immunogens. Here, we investigate the effect of immune stimulation on cognitive-behavioural parameters in healthy mice and its impact on cognitive sequelae resulting from non-severe experimental malaria. We show that immune modulation induced by a specific combination of immune stimuli that induce a type 2 immune response can enhance long-term recognition memory in healthy adult mice subjected to novel object recognition task (NORT) and reverse a lack of recognition ability in NORT and anxiety-like behaviour in a light/dark task that result from a single episode of mild Plasmodium berghei ANKA malaria. Our findings suggest a potential use of immunogens for boosting and recovering recognition memory that may be impaired by chronic and infectious diseases and by the effects of ageing.
Highlights
The immune system plays a role in the maintenance of healthy neurocognitive function
Our results show a beneficial effect of immune stimulation on cognitive-behavioural parameters in healthy mice and a reversal of cognitive impairment caused by malaria parasite infection
The open field task (OFT) paradigm followed by novel object recognition task (NORT) protocol has been extensively used in preclinical studies to assess different aspects involved in learning and memory, allowing the detection of neuropsychological changes following pharmacological, biological, or genetic m anipulations[31] and the results provided using both of these behavioural paradigms are usually reliable
Summary
The immune system plays a role in the maintenance of healthy neurocognitive function. We investigate the effect of immune stimulation on cognitive-behavioural parameters in healthy mice and its impact on cognitive sequelae resulting from non-severe experimental malaria. Cerebral malaria (CM), the most severe complication of human malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum[9], can result in neurocognitive sequelae, including motor deficits, behavioural alterations and severe learning difficulties[7,10,11,12]. Some of these sequelae are observed in Plasmodium berghei ANKA (PbA) infected C57BL/6 mice, a well-studied model of experimental CM (ECM)[8,13,14]. Our results show a beneficial effect of immune stimulation on cognitive-behavioural parameters in healthy mice and a reversal of cognitive impairment caused by malaria parasite infection
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