“Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorder that typically emerges in late adolescence or early adulthood. In rats, administration of the DNA-alkylating agent methylazoxymethanol acetate (MAM) on gestational day (GD) 17 induces several features resembling those observed in SCZ patients.
Preclinical and clinical studies suggest that cannabidiol (CBD) has antipsychotic-like effects.
Here, we evaluated whether acute CBD treatment attenuates behavioral deficits and the enhanced dopamine (DA) system activity in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of adult male and female MAM rats.
Pregnant rats received saline or MAM (20 mg/kg) on GD17. In adulthood, offspring were tested in the elevated plus-maze (EPM), novel object recognition (NOR) test, and locomotor responses to the NMDA receptor antagonist MK-801. The in vivo electrophysiological activity of VTA DA neurons was also recorded. CBD (60 mg/kg) was administered 1 h before each behavioral test and electrophysiological recording.
Male and female MAM rats exhibited anxiety-like behavior in the EPM, which was not reversed by CBD. In the NOR test, CBD reversed memory impairment in male MAM rats, whereas female MAM rats showed no deficits. Neither male nor female MAM rats exhibited increased locomotor responses to MK-801, and CBD did not affect this behavior. Both male and female MAM rats showed increased VTA DA neuron population activity, which was reversed by CBD in both sexes.
Our findings indicate that CBD attenuates cognitive deficits and enhanced DA system activity in the MAM model, supporting the hypothesis that CBD produces antipsychotic-like effects.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41118689/
“Cannabidiol (CBD) is a non-psychotomimetic compound of the Cannabis sativa plant and has demonstrated antipsychotic-like properties in clinical (Leweke et al., 2012, Leweke et al., 2021; McGuire et al., 2018; Zuardi et al., 2006) and preclinical studies employing different animal models of SCZ (Gomes et al., 2015a, Gomes et al., 2015b; Long et al., 2012; Osborne et al., 2019; Osborne et al., 2017b; Rodrigues da Silva et al., 2020), including the MAM model (Stark et al., 2019, Stark et al., 2020; Thériault et al., 2021).”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0920996425003639?via%3Dihub