Basic Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Psychiatr. Jun 22, 2016; 6(2): 215-220
Published online Jun 22, 2016. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v6.i2.215
Failure of memantine to “reverse” quinpirole-induced hypomotility
Francesca Demontis, Gino Serra
Francesca Demontis, Gino Serra, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Sassari, 07100 Sassari, Italy
Author contributions: All authors contributed to this work.
Supported by Fondazione Banco di Sardegna, Italy (Grant no 2013 U718/AI.642.MGB).
Institutional animal care and use committee statement: The present study was carried out in accordance with Italian law, which allows experiments on laboratory animals only after submission of a research project to the competent authorities, and in accordance with the “Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals” 8th Edition (National Research Council of Academies, the National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2011).
Conflict-of-interest statement: Dr. Gino Serra has applied for a patent for the use of memantine to treat bipolar disorder. No other author or immediate family member has current financial relationships with commercial entities that might represent or appear to represent potential conflicts of interest with the material presented here.
Data sharing statement: Original data are reported.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Dr. Gino Serra, MD, Professor, Department of Biomedical Science, University of Sassari, Viale San Pietro 43/b, 07100 Sassari, Italy. dsfserra@uniss.it
Telephone: +39-32-90092278 Fax: +39-07-9228715
Received: October 13, 2015
Peer-review started: October 14, 2015
First decision: January 15, 2016
Revised: January 28, 2016
Accepted: March 14, 2016
Article in press: March 16, 2016
Published online: June 22, 2016
Processing time: 250 Days and 22.6 Hours
Abstract

AIM: To evaluate antidepressant-like effect of memantine in a rat model.

METHODS: Male Wistar rats were treated intraperitoneally with either vehicle, memantine (10 mg/kg) or imipramine (20 mg/kg), for 3 wk. Twenty-four hour after the last treatment animals were challenged with quinpirole (0.3 mg/kg s.c.) and tested for motor activity. After 1 h habituation to the motility cages, the motor response was recorded for the following 45-min and the data were collected in 5-min time bins.

RESULTS: As expected, chronic treatment with imipramine potentiated the locomotor stimulant effect of quinpirole. On the contrary, chronic memantine administration failed to induce the behavioral supersensitivity to the dopamine agonist.

CONCLUSION: The results show that memantine, at variance with antidepressant treatments, fails to induce dopaminergic behavioral supersensitivity. This observation is consistent with the results of preclinical and clinical studies suggesting that memantine does not have an acute antidepressant action but does have an antimanic and mood-stabilizing effect.

Keywords: Memantine; Bipolar disorder; Depression; Mood stabilizer; Imipramine; D2 sensitization

Core tip: Memantine at variance with virtually all antidepressant treatments, fails to induce dopaminergic behavioral supersensitivity. This observation is consistent with the results of preclinical and clinical studies suggesting that memantine does not have an acute antidepressant action but does have an antimanic and mood-stabilizing effect.