Depressão experimental e tratamento agudo com cetamina : análise comportamental, neurometabólica e histofisiológica dopaminérgica

• Autor(a) principal: Baptista, Pedro Porto Alegre
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da PUC_RS
• Texto Completo: http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/6367
• topic: BIOLOGIA CELULAR; BIOLOGIA MOLECULAR; DEPRESSÃO; SEROTONINA; ANTIDEPRESSIVOS; CIENCIAS BIOLOGICAS::BIOLOGIA GERAL

The major depressive disorder (MDD) is a psychiatric condition which profoundly alters with the brain metabolism and neurochemistry characterized by a state of deep, chronic sadness, accompanied by anhedonia, sensation of worthlessness and lack of motivation, often leading the patient to suicide. The ventral tegmental area (VTA) is an important dopaminergic region intimately associated with the pathophysiology of MDD. Ketamine is a drug that antagonizes the glutamatergic NMDA receptors which has been shown to exert an immediate antidepressant effect and the treatment with ketamine is a promising new alternative for MDD therapeutic. Furthermore, the small animal positron emission tomography (microPET) is a technique which allows the assessment of the temporal-spatial distribution of radiolabelled molecules in vivo, and the utilization of 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) as a radiotracer for this analysis still needs standardization in our University. In this sense, this thesis has been divided into two stages. Firstly, we standardized the brain metabolic assessment technique using 18F-FDG associated with microPET in Wistar rats, and with it, we rendered a neurometabolic atlas of the distribution of 18F-FDG in 56 brain regions. We compared our neurometabolic data with data from five other scientific articles which assessed the biochemical and immunohistochemical activity of cytochrome c oxidase (COX), these techniques are traditionally used for assessment of ex vivo brain metabolism. Thus, we ranked the regions analyzed in our study and the regions from the selected COX studies, and correlated the rankings with the Spearman test for non-parametric ranked data correlation. In this study we detailed the distribution of 18F-FDG in the brain of Wistar rats. On four of the selected studies we did not find a correlation, only on Shumake at al.´s study we found a moderate correlation (r=0.56, p=0.023). In the second stage, we analyzed the influence of acute ketamine treatment on the depressive-like behavior, the glucose metabolism and tyrosine hydroxylase activity (TH) (a rate-limiting dopamine synthesis enzyme) in the VTA of animals exposed to the chronic unpredictable stress (CUS). In this study, 48 Wistar rats were divided into four groups: 1-Control, 2-Ketamine, 3-CUS, 4-CUS+Ketamine. The animals undergone the CUS protocol were expose to several stressors, twice-daily, for 28 consecutive days. The treatment consisted of a single intraperitoneal injection of 10mg/kg of ketamine. For the behavioral analysis the sucrose preference test, the open field test, and the forced swim test were executed. The glucose metabolism and TH immunoreactivity in the VTA were analyzed by 18F-FDG-microPET and immunohistochemistry for TH, respectively. The CUS groups showed a decrease in sucrose solution intake and an increase in the immobility time on the forced swim test, and ketamine treatment was able to reverted the depressive-like behavior (p<0.05. The CUS protocol and ketamine treatment did not influence upon the 18F-FDG uptake or the TH immunoreactivity in the VTA. The results obtained in this thesis aid on the standardizing of the use of 18F-FDG with microPET, for the analyses on brain metabolism in our university. Furthermore, with the CUS protocol, we confirmed the acute, antidepressant effect of ketamine, however, our finds indicated that this effect is not related to metabolic or dopaminergic physiology in the VTA.