chronic oral pelargonidin alleviates learning and memory disturbances in streptozotocin-diabetic rats

diabetes mellitus is accompanied with disturbances in learning, memory, and cognitive skills in the humans and experimental animals. due to the anti-diabetic and antioxidant activity of pelargonidin (pg), this research study was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of chronic oral pg on alleviating learning and memory disturbance in streptozotocin-diabetic rats. male wistar rats were divided into control, diabetic, pg-treated control and pg (single- and/or multiple-dose)-treated diabetic groups. pg was administered p.o. once at a dose of 10 mg/kg and/or multiple doses on alternate days for 8 weeks. for induction of diabetes, streptozotocin (stz) was injected ip in a single dose of 60 mg/kg. for the evaluation of learning and memory, initial latency (il) and step-through latency (stl) were determined at the end of study using a passive avoidance test. meanwhile, spatial memory was assessed in a y-maze task. it was found that the alternation score of the diabetic rats was lower than the control (p < 0.05) and that single dose pg-treated diabetic rats (p < 0.05) showed a higher alternation score in comparison with the diabetic group. regarding initial latency, there was no significant difference among the groups. in addition, diabetic and single-dose pg-treated diabetic rats developed a significant impairment in retention and recall in the passive avoidance test (p < 0.01), as was evident by a lower stl. furthermore, the retention and recall of multiple-dose pg-treated diabetic rats was significantly higher in comparison with diabetic rats (p < 0.05). therefore, it can be concluded that single-dose oral pg may attenuate spatial memory in the y maze paradigm and multiple-dose chronic pg could improve retention and recall capability in the passive avoidance test in stz-diabetic rats.