Neill, J. C., Liu, Z., Mikati, M., & Holmes, G. L. (2005).
Pilocarpine seizures cause age-dependent impairment in auditory location
discrimination.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 84, 357-
370.
Children who have status epilepticus have continuous or rapidly repeating
seizures that may be life-threatening and may cause life-long changes in brain
and behavior. The extent to which status epilepticus causes deficits in
auditory discrimination is unknown. A naturalistic auditory location
discrimination method was used to evaluate this question using an animal model
of status epilepticus. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were injected with saline on
postnatal day (P) 20, or a convulsant dose of pilocarpine on P20 or P45.
Pilocarpine on either day induced status epilepticus; status epilepticus at P45
resulted in CA3 cell loss and spontaneous seizures, whereas P20 rats had no cell
loss or spontaneous seizures. Mature rats were trained with sound-source
location and sound-silence discriminations. Control (saline P20) rats acquired
both discriminations immediately. In status epilepticus (P20) rats, acquisition
of the sound-source location discrimination was moderately impaired. Status
epilepticus (P45) rats failed to acquire either sound-source location or sound-
silence discriminations. Status epilepticus in rat causes an age-dependent,
long-term impairment in auditory discrimination. This impairment may explain
one cause of impaired auditory location discrimination in humans.
Key words: auditory discrimination, epilepsy, seizures, age, hippocampus, lever
press, rats