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The Effect of Exercise Post-Cardiac Arrest on Cell Death in Memory-Related Brain Regions and the Effect of Exercise on Contextual/Fear Memory in Rats
Location: East Ballroom
Mentor: Dr. Miguel Perez-Pinzon
50% of cardiac arrest survivors will suffer cognitive deficits such as memory loss following resuscitation as a result of hypoxic brain injury. Physical exercise (PE) has been shown to have a positive effect on memory in both human and animal models. We hypothesized that PE post-asphyxial cardiac arrest (post-ACA) will ameliorate neuronal death in some memory-related areas of the brain, including the basolateral amygdala, retrosplenial cortex, and nucleus basalis. To test this hypothesis, we used histopathology of brain tissue samples from 9-10 week-old male Spraque-Dawley rats to compare the number of live cells (NLC) in rats that did and did not exercise post-ACA to control animals. We found that cell death was only reduced in the retrosplenial cortex in rats who exercised post-ACA versus rats who did not exercise. Additionally, we conducted a pilot study using 9- to 10- week old female Spraque-Dawley rats with the goal of eventually determining the effect of PE post-ACA on retrograde amnesia. A previous study demonstrated that PE post-ACA minimizes anterograde amnesia in rats. We used contextual fear conditioning (CFC) and analysis of freezing behavior to test the animals’ ability to remember contextual/fear memories over a 21-day period without yet incorporating the ACA. We found that both the exercise and non-exercise groups showed a decrease in freezing behaviors over time, but there were no significant differences between the two groups. These findings suggest that for future experiments including ACA, the recovery period must be shortened to match the animals’ memory retention capacity.
