Potencial protetivo do Tempol nos efeitos deletérios do álcool no comportamento de Zebrafish

Abstract

Alcohol is one of the most consumed licit drugs in the world. However, this drug's indiscriminate and excessive consumption brings great social, economic, and health damages. Currently, it is believed that part of the deleterious effects of alcohol is consequences of the exacerbated production of "reactive oxygen species", molecules that affect the normal homeostasis of the organism. In this work, we tested whether the use of a synthetic antioxidant substance, tempol, could reduce or even eliminate the harmful effects of alcohol in the body since antioxidants have the potential to reduce the number of reactive oxygen species. Thus, we focused this study on evaluating the protective potential of tempol in a cognitive context (memory test) and a stressful situation. For this, we used an animal model already established in the field of psychopharmacology, the zebrafish. The animals were treated with tempol, alcohol, tempol + alcohol, and water (control group). We used the protocol of memorization and discrimination of objects to evaluate how the tempol could reduce the deleterious effects of alcohol in the formation and recovery of memory in the animals. Our results indicate that there was impairment in the discrimination of objects by the alcohol group, but both the tempol group and the tempol + alcohol group showed greater exploration of the new object, indicating that they could discriminate. In another step, the animals were submitted to unpredictable chronic stress treatment and tested for locomotor and anxious-like behavior after treatment with tempol. We observed that the locomotor parameters of the groups not stressed and treated with alcohol and tempol + alcohol were lower than the other groups. As for the anxiety response, the unstressed groups of the control and tempol treatment had the smallest distances from the bottom of the aquarium. In general, our results indicate a protective activity of tempol for the harmful effects of alcohol on tasks requiring memory, but no effect in chronic stress situations, which may have resulted from low tempol concentration or low potency of the stress protocol used. We reaffirm the zebrafish as an experimental model for the search for new options for drugs that protect the nervous system, and we suggest that further studies seek to deepen the knowledge about the actions of time.