Learning behaviour in chronic vitamin E-deficient and -supplemented rats: radial arm maze learning and passive avoidance response.

The effects of long-term vitamin E deficiency and supplementation on learning behaviour were investigated. Rats were fed vitamin E-deficient [VE(-)], -supplemented [VE(+)], or control standard food beginning after the age of 4 weeks. They were trained in an eight-arm radial maze learning task at the age of 17 months, and in a step-through passive avoidance response (PAR) task at the age of 25 months. In the radial maze task, both VE(-) and VE(+) animals required as many trials to reach the learning criterion as control animals. Scopolamine injection (0.25-0.5 mg/kg) after acquisition of the task decreased the number of correct choices dose-dependently; however, the degree of the drug effect on VE(-) and VE(+) rats did not differ from that on control rats. On the other hand, VE(-) animals showed significantly lower rate of avoidance response and VE(+) animals tended to show higher rate of avoidance response in the PAR task than did control animals. These results suggest that long-term vitamin E deficiency or supplementation does not influence general ability to acquire and maintain memory tasks in rats, but that it may affect learning behaviour, depending on the kind of task in which animals were trained.