Effects of Long-Term Ayahuasca Administration on Memory and Anxiety in Rats
PLoS ONE December 30, 2015 Vanessa Manchim Favaro, Maurı́cio Yonamine, Juliana Carlota Kramer Soares et al. 33 citations
Long-term daily administration of ayahuasca to rats for 30 days did not affect their performance in the Morris water maze or elevated plus maze tasks. However, a dose of 120 mg/kg increased the contextual conditioned fear response for both background and foreground fear conditioning, while the tone-conditioned response remained unaffected. This heightened contextual fear response persisted across repeated sessions several weeks after training. These results indicate that long-term ayahuasca exposure can selectively enhance the contextual association of emotional events, consistent with the beverage's known activation of brain regions involved in emotional processing and memory.