Animal Models of Amnesia

Introduction to Amnesia

As the general headquarters of the human body, brain plays a significant role in controlling various psychological and physiological activities, such as movements, thoughts, memory, and so forth. Once the brain is injured by factors like head trauma, diseases, drug abuse, or other damages, it will cause a series of neurological diseases. Amnesia, also known as dysmnesia, is one of the neurological diseases that is characterized by full or partial loss of memory. Amnesia can be divided into retrograde amnesia, antegrade amnesia, and transient total amnesia according to the presenting symptoms, and post-traumatic amnesia, dissociative amnesia, drug-induced amnesia, etc., according to the causes. It has been indicated that both retrograde and antegrade amnesia were closely associated with damage to the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe structures.

Animal Models of Amnesia

Using animal models to explore the pathogenesis and therapies for human diseases is favorable and advantageous, especially when it comes to nervous system-related disease investigation, which is complicated and difficult to obtain tissue samples. Since the 1950s, several amnesia animal models have been developed over these decades, not only for mechanism exploration and memory research, but also for the effective therapy discoveries for human amnesia.

• Scopolamine-induced amnesia model: Scopolamine, an anticholinergic drug, is a central nervous system inhibitor, which inhibits the excitability of the nervous system by antagonizing muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. Since the function of the cholinergic nerve is closely related to learning and memory, scopolamine is widely used in animal modeling of amnesia. Compared with other models, scopolamine induces amnesia without requiring complex surgical procedures, and can be modeled by intraperitoneal injection or injection into the amygdala. This amnesia modeling is more suitable for rodents.
• Dizocilpine-induced amnesia model: The N-Methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor plays important role in synaptic plasticity regulation and memory processes. Dizocilpine, a noncompetitive NMDA receptor antagonist, can induce memory impairment and amnesia, even schizophrenia. Dizocilpine-induced amnesia mouse is modeled by intraperitoneal injection.
• Non-human primate amnesia model: Monkey models of human amnesia have been developed before the 20th century, which is mainly modeled by bilateral damage to the medial temporal lobe. Primate amnesia modeling is much more complex, takes longer, and costs much more than the previous two modeling methods, but it simulates human global amnesia better and makes more sense to explore amnesia mechanisms and treatments.

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