Chronic ethanol consumption impairs spatial remote memory in rats but does not affect cortical cholinergic parameters

We have studied learning, memory and cortical cholinergic parameters after oral administration of 20% v/v ethanol solution to male Fisher rats for 6 months. A group of rats were trained to behave efficiently in an eight arm radial maze and after that split into two subgroups submitted to ethanol or control treatment. Ethanol-treated rats had more difficulty in relearning the same task 1 year later, compared to ethanol-untreated rats (control). Differences in working memory performance were found, but only in the first 10 training sessions. Another group of rats, which had not been pretrained, was also split into two subgroups submitted to ethanol or control treatment. After that, these rats were trained in the radial maze task for the first time. No significant difference was found between the reference memory performance of the untreated subgroup and the treated one. These two subgroups did not significantly differ in their working memory performance either. Moreover, there were no significant differences between treated and control subjects in the following biochemical brain cortical parameters: in vitro acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity, and stimulated acetylcholine (ACh) release. This work presents an experimental design that allows assessment of remote memory performance after ethanol chronic consumption and shows that the experimental subject is able to retain the behaviors learned 1 year before. It was concluded that chronic ethanol treatment may cause retrograde amnesia, which does not seem to be linked with a cortical cholinergic deficit. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc.