ISRN Psychiatry
Volume 2012, Article ID 595141, 5 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.5402/2012/595141
Comparative Evaluation of Forced Swim Test and Tail Suspension Test as Models of Negative Symptom of Schizophrenia in Rodents
Neuropharmacology Unit, Division of Pharmacology, Central Drug Research Institute, CSIR, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow 226001, India
Received 1 September 2011; Accepted 2 October 2011
Academic Editors: R. P. Rajarethinam and R. Yoshimura
Copyright © 2012 Manavi Chatterjee et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Previous studies have shown that the administration of NMDA antagonist can induce negative symptoms of schizophrenia which can be tested through the enhanced immobility observed in the forced swim test (FST). In the present study, we have compared the effects of acute as well as chronic administration of a noncompetitive NMDA receptor antagonist, ketamine on FST, and another behaviour despair model, tail suspension test (TST). Our observations suggest that chronic ketamine administration induced a state of enhanced immobility in FST, but such findings were not replicated in the TST model. Further, in FST, treatment with clozapine reverses the ketamine-induced immobility in mice, whereas it enhances the immobility duration in the TST model. However, haloperidol showed no protective effects in both models. The data suggests that although both of these tests show common behavioural measure of feeling despair, however, the underlying pathophysiology seems to be different. Hence, forced swim test but not tail suspension test can be used as a model of negative symptom of psychosis in mice.