Locomotor activity, exploration and spatial alternation learning in rats with striatal injections of kainic acid

Abstract

Bilateral injections of three nmoles of kainic acid into the rat striatum induced a set of behavioral alterations including temporary aphagia and adipsia, abnormal gait, acute and chronically recurrent seizures, interference with onset of ambulatory actvity and impairments in performance of instrumental spatial alternation. In addition to a severe loss of striatal neurons in all kainate-treated rats, the kainate injections often resulted in extrastriatal neuronal loss, most consistently involving the pyramidal neurons of the hippocampus. Similar regulatory, locomotor, and learning alterations were however found both in kainate-treated rats with combined striatal and hippocampal lesions and in those with no detectable hippocampal damage, suggesting that the striatal degeneration accounted in large part for the behavioral impairments. Although striatal injections of kainic acid may fail to produce selective neuronal degeneration in the striatum, they result in behavioral disorders that appear to be similar, at least superficially, to those of patients with Huntington's disease, thus encouraging further use of this neurotoxin as a tool for reproducing some aspects of this disease.