MDMA pretreatment leads to mild chronic unpredictable stress-induced impairments in spatial learning.
Behavioral Neuroscience October 1, 2009 Jacobi I. Cunningham, Jamie Raudensky, John Tonkiss et al. 27 citations
Prior exposure to MDMA makes rats vulnerable to stress-induced learning impairments that do not occur with stress alone. Rats pretreated with MDMA and then exposed to mild chronic unpredictable stress seven days later showed impaired learning in the Morris water maze, whereas stress alone did not cause this deficit. MDMA alone increased anxiety-like behavior on the elevated plus maze, but chronic stress alone or combined with MDMA pretreatment did not increase anxiety. The learning impairment was not accompanied by enhanced depletion of the serotonin transporter in the hippocampus, suggesting the effect involves mechanisms beyond serotonin transporter loss.