Behavioral Effects of Adenosine

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Authors
Priebe, Jessica M.
Issue Date
2010
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
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Abstract
The field of behavioral pharmacology characterizes the many different behavioral consequences of drug administration. The effects of drugs can influence the chances of repeated use and can be classified as reinforcing, punishing, or having no effect. Drug self-administration procedures are used in order to determine whether a certain drug, administered intravenously to an animal, elicits either reinforcing or punishing behavioral effects. A modified self-administration procedure using rats can be used to rapidly determine the categorization of many different types of drugs. The goal of the experiments conducted in this study was to behaviorally categorize the drug adenosine, a purine nucleoside found and released by all cells in the body. In order to examine the behavioral effects of adenosine and determine an appropriate dose (3.0 mg/kglinj), cardiovascular, nociceptive, and locomotor experiments were conducted in rats prior to the modified self-administration procedure. In this experiment, intravenously administered adenosine (3.0 and 0.32 mg/kg/injection) was found to significantly reduce both blood pressure (p < 0.0001) and heart rate (p < 0.0001). Examining adenosine's effects on nociception using a tail withdrawal assay, found no significant changes in pain threshold. However, the physical signs of sedation were observed and with a locomotor assay, adenosine (3.0 mg/kg/injection) was found to significantly (p=0.0489) reduce locomotor activity. Using all of the data from the above experiments, a behaviorally active dose of 1.6 , mglkglinjection was introduced in the modified self-administration procedure. It was found that adenosine functions as a punisher of operant behavior in rats. However, the elucidation of the exact mechanisms of these punishing effects requires further research.
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v, 35 p.
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Kalamazoo College
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U.S. copyright laws protect this material. Commercial use or distribution of this material is not permitted without prior written permission of the copyright holder.
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