Estrous cycle and sex differences in performance on anxiety tasks coincide with increases in hippocampal progesterone and 3α,5α-THP
Section snippets
Method
These methods were pre-approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
Horizontal crossings
There was a tendency for proestrous females to make more beam breaks in the horizontal crossing task than males [F(3,75)=2.271, P<.087; see Table 1].
Open field
The proestrous and estrous females entered significantly more peripheral [F(3,75)=3.082, P<.03; see Fig. 1] and total squares [F(3,75)=3.456, P<.03] than did males. There was no significant difference between groups in the total number of central squares entered. The average number of central squares entered by each group was proestrus 33 (±4),
Discussion
Proestrous females exhibited more anxiolytic-like behavior than other groups on some, but not all, of the tasks and had significantly higher hippocampal and plasma progesterone and 3α,5α-THP levels than did all other females and males. The increased anxiolytic-like behavior of the proestrous rats, compared to all other groups, was demonstrated by significantly more open arm entries and time in the elevated plus-maze, longer social interactions with conspecifics, and less freezing time in
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by grants from The Whitehall Foundation (96-10) and by the National Science Foundation (95-14463; 98-96263). We thank Dr. Robert Rosellini for his assistance with the horizontal crossing and defensive burying techniques.
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