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The Journal of Neuroscience, July 20, 2005, 25(29):6877-6886; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1744-05.2005

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Age-Associated Alterations of Hippocampal Place Cells Are Subregion Specific

Iain A. Wilson,¹ Sami Ikonen,¹ Michela Gallagher,² Howard Eichenbaum,³ and Heikki Tanila^1,4

¹Department of Neuroscience and Neurology, University of Kuopio, Kuopio 70211, Finland, ²Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, ³Department of Psychology, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, and ⁴Department of Neurology, Kuopio University Hospital, Kuopio 70211, Finland

Aging is associated with spatial memory impairments and with deficient encoding of information by the hippocampus. In young adult rats, recent studies on the firing properties of hippocampal neurons have emphasized the importance of the CA3 subregion in the rapid encoding of new spatial information. Here, we compared the spatial firing patterns of CA1 and CA3 neurons in aged memory-impaired rats with those of young rats as they explored familiar and novel environments. We found that CA1 place cells in aged and young rats had similar firing characteristics in the familiar and novel environments. In contrast, aged CA3 place cells had higher firing rates in general and failed to change their firing rates and place fields as much as CA3 cells of young rats when the rats were introduced to a novel environment. Thus, aged CA3 cells failed to rapidly encode new spatial information compared with young CA3 cells. These data suggest an important and selective contribution of CA3 dysfunction to age-related memory impairment.

Key words: aging; age-associated cognitive impairment; CA1; CA3; hippocampus; place cells; spatial memory

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Received May 2, 2005; revised June 7, 2005; accepted June 7, 2005.

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