Daily access to sucrose impairs aspects of spatial memory tasks reliant on pattern separation and neural proliferation in rats
- 1School of Psychology, UNSW Australia, UNSW Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia
- 2School of Medical Sciences, UNSW Australia, UNSW Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia
- Corresponding author: amy.reichelt{at}rmit.edu.au
Abstract
High sugar diets reduce hippocampal neurogenesis, which is required for minimizing interference between memories, a process that involves “pattern separation.” We provided rats with 2 h daily access to a sucrose solution for 28 d and assessed their performance on a spatial memory task. Sucrose consuming rats discriminated between objects in novel and familiar locations when there was a large spatial separation between the objects, but not when the separation was smaller. Neuroproliferation markers in the dentate gyrus of the sucrose-consuming rats were reduced relative to controls. Thus, sucrose consumption impaired aspects of spatial memory and reduced hippocampal neuroproliferation.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.042416.116.
- Received March 22, 2016.
- Accepted April 27, 2016.
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