Received: April 05, 2021; Published: May 06, 2021

Abstract

  Humans’ consumption of antidepressants is nowadays increasing. One of the most used for treating severe depressions is escitalopram, an inhibitor of the serotonin recapture, and being so, even if efficient, it may have harmful side effects. Using ants as models, we studied the effect of escitalopram on 13 physiological and ethological traits, the potential adaptation to these effects, the dependence on escitalopram consumption, and the loss of the effect of the drug after weaning. We found that escitalopram impacted the ants’ food consumption, general activity, orientation ability, tactile perception, social relationships, cognition, learning and memory. The ants did not adapt themselves to the impact escitalopram and did not develop dependence on this drug consumption. Young ants seemed to be more affected than the old ones by escitalopram consumption. After weaning, the effect of escitalopram first remained intact during 6 hours, and then slowly decreased in about 30 hours, what accounted for the no dependence on this drug consumption. Most of our results agree with effects observed in humans and with the dosage advised to patients (a dose of 10 mg every 24 hours). A few side effects seen in ants have not (or not yet) been observed in humans and should be thus examined (e.g. effect on social relationships, learning and memory). Habituation to the positive effect of escitalopram, impossible to study on ants, should be checked in humans since in case of its occurrence, humans will increase their drug consumption and therefore the impact of the side effects.

Keywords: Cognition; Food Intake; Learning; Memory; Myrmica sabuleti

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Citation

Citation: Marie-Claire Cammaerts. “Physiological and Ethological Impacts of the Antidepressant Escitalopram Studied on Ants as Models". Acta Scientific Pharmaceutical Sciences 5.6 (2020): 02-16.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2021 Marie-Claire Cammaerts. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.