Depression is an extremely common, devastating psychiatric syndrome with profound effects on the structure of neurons and the proteins that they express. However, the pathophysiology of depression remains unclear despite decades of extensive research efforts, and this lack of understanding makes it difficult to develop effective treatments. It is extremely problematic that conventional antidepressant drugs do not work for many patients, and those that do respond require weeks to months of continuous treatment before adequate therapeutic improvement is achieved. Therefore, there is a clear unmet need to develop mechanistically novel antidepressant compounds that are well-tolerated, more effective, and faster acting.
Subjecting rats to repeated-corticosterone (CORT; stress hormone analogous to cortisol for humans) injections produces a depressive-like phenotype that can be used to make inferences about the human condition and screen compounds for antidepressant properties. Our laboratory has previously found that stress downregulates hippocampal reelin in a similar manner to that seen in depression patients, and that drugs with antidepressant actions recover this deficit. This provided a rationale to administer reelin directly into the hippocampus, which rescued behavioral and neurochemical deficits, but intrahippocampal infusions are not clinically viable. Reelin is expressed in the periphery and blood as well as the brain, so the aims of the collection of studies described here are to evaluate the antidepressant-like properties of peripheral intravenous (i.v.) reelin. In the first experiment, the antidepressant-like effects of several dosages of reelin (3/5μg given every 5/10 days) were evaluated in rats that were exposed to 3-weeks of daily CORT (40mg/kg) injections. I found that all the dosages of reelin attenuated CORT-induced despair-like behavior in the forced-swim test (FST) and normalized alterations in serotonin (5-HT) transporter (SERT) membrane protein clustering (MPC) in blood lymphocytes. Reelin treatment also increased reelin-immunoreactive (IR) cell counts in the hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG) subgranular zone (SGZ), but it had less of an effect on neurogenesis as measured by the number and maturation rate of doublecortin (DCX)-IR cells. Interestingly, the lowest dosage used also rescued the number of reelin-IR cells in the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN). This suggested that the restoration of SGZ-reelin plays a pivotal role in attenuating depressive-like behavior and that 3μg every 10 days was the most effective dosage that was tested.
Using the lowest dosage that showed to be effective in the first experiment, I then evaluated if male and female rats responded similarly to i.v. reelin using a larger battery of behavioral tests. Post-mortem tissue analyses focused on reelin and receptors that bind gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutamate in the SGZ, which have been implicated in psychiatric disorders and the mediation of fast-acting antidepressant responses. I found that reelin rescued the FST- behavioral and neurochemical alterations induced by CORT similarly in both sexes, indicating that it may have therapeutic effects by normalizing inhibitory/excitatory transmission. I also evaluated the effect of i.v. reelin on neurogenesis in females and found that, akin to males, the regulation of adult-born cells by peripheral reelin is unlikely to mediate the antidepressant-like effects.
The goal of the third experiment was to examine whether the antidepressant-like effects of peripheral reelin are achieved in a rapid manner. I found that a single 3μg injection after 3 weeks of CORT significantly decreased behavioral deficits in the FST 24 hours later in both sexes. Reelin also partially rescued cognitive deficits and expression levels of reelin, GluN2B, and mitochondrial-related pro-apoptotic factors bcl-2 associated X protein (BAX) and cytochrome C (CytC) in the DG. In addition, a single injection of reelin fully recovered the number of GluA1-expressing cells and partially recovered SERT cluster size in males, whereas reelin partially recovered GluA1-IR cell counts and fully recovered SERT cluster sizes in females. Reelin had modest effects on DCX-IR cells in both sexes.
The final chapter summarizes and discusses my findings, which suggest that the antidepressant-like effects of peripheral reelin are associated with the recovery of neurochemical deficits that strengthen neurotransmission, at least in the hippocampus. Therefore, developing reelin-based therapeutics with antidepressant activity would be a fruitful area of research, although additional mechanistic, pharmacokinetic, and pharmacodynamic studies are essential. / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/13893 |
| Date | 28 April 2022 |
| Creators | Allen, Josh |
| Contributors | Caruncho, Hector, Kalynchuk, Lisa |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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