Home|Journals|Articles by Year|Audio Abstracts
 

Original Research



Effect of metformin on the spatial memory in aged rats

Zobeideh Ashrostaghi, Farzaneh Ganji, Hamid Sepehri.




Abstract

Background: Aging process is often accompanied with some degree of decline in all the abilities, including learning and memory. One of the attracting research fields has been devoted to finding antiaging drugs. Metformin has shown some memory-enhancing features in aged humans and laboratory animals.

Aims and Objective: To evaluate the effects of 50, 75, and 100 mg/kg of metformin on the spatial memory performance of aged rats in the Morris water maze.

Materials and Methods: Thirty-two male 24-month-old rats were divided randomly into four groups (n = 8) including control group and 50-, 75-, and 100-mg/kg metformin groups. After 36 days of treatment, the learning process was assessed by the reference memory task in the Morris water maze. All the rats received water maze training (four trials/day for 5 days) to assess the hippocampal-dependent spatial learning and, then, received a 60-s probe trial test of spatial memory retention 24 h after the twentieth trial.

Result: Over 5 days of training, metformin (50, 75, and 100 mg/kg/day) treatment significantly reduced the latency and path length to find the escape platform (P < 0.01). In probe trials (without platform), on the last day of training, the metformin-treated groups spent significantly longer time in the platform quadrant when compared with the control group. Among the treated groups, 100 mg/kg dosage of metformin induced the best rehearsals memory (P < 0.05).

Conclusion: These results showed that, in the old rats, 36-day orally administered metformin showed a positive influence on the spatial memory performance in the Morris water maze.

Key words: Aging; Spatial Memory; Metformin; Morris Water Maze






Full-text options


Share this Article


Online Article Submission
• ejmanager.com




ejPort - eJManager.com
Refer & Earn
JournalList
About BiblioMed
License Information
Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy
Contact Us

The articles in Bibliomed are open access articles licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.