Schizophrenia is a mental illness with early adult onset. Prophylactic treatments would be clinically important and therefore we investigated the effect of two interventions: influenza vaccination of pregnant mothers and valproate treatment during late adolescence. Maternal immune response during pregnancy is thought to adversely affect brain development. We sought to assess whether immune activation by influenza vaccine could itself cause behavioural abnormalities in a mouse model. Our data suggest that further work is needed to make firm conclusions about the behavioural effects of the influenza vaccine. The second part of this thesis describes an analysis of valproate treatment on cortical neuron morphology in Disc1 L100P mice, a model for schizophrenia. Valproate was previously shown to prevent the onset of abnormal behaviours in Disc1 L100P mice. Contrary to expectations, valproate decreased apical spine density and the number of dendritic processes rather than reversing the dendritic deficits seen in Disc1 L100P mice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/33400 |
| Date | 21 November 2012 |
| Creators | Doucet, Jean-Sebastien |
| Contributors | Wong, Albert Hung Choy |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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