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Zebrafish is being used as a model for preclinical studies because of its unique innate physiological and behavioral aspects that almost correlate to the mammals including human. Many behavioral models have been developed based on visual stimuli, appetite conditioning, colour preference ability of zebrafish. In the present study, we used two different colors (Red and Green) which are the equal preference of zebrafish to avoid the bias and food was placed in one of the colored short arms (Green) only during the training sessions. In the test session, food was not placed in the green arm and animals were evaluated for its learning and memory in finding out the food. For evaluating the newly designed T-Maze, we employed two drugs, Scopolamine, that induce memory impairment and Rivastigmine that ameliorates the effects of scopolamine. In the test session, animals treated only with scopolamine spent less time in the green arm and found to have more number of total entries unlike the animals pre-treated with Rivastigmine one hour before scopolamine treatment. Results showed that Rivastigmine reduced the memory impairment effects of scopolamine. The findings from the present study suggest that the newly designed color bias avoided and appetite conditioning T-Maze was found to be useful for evaluating the memory enhancing drugs effectively.

Peripheral vascular disease is a major macrovascular complication of diabetes mellitus. This study was done to determine the prevalence of peripheral arterial disease in type 2 diabetes mellitus using the ankle brachial pressure index. An 12 MHz doppler probe was used in the arms and legs to assess the ankle brachial index (ABI) in 200 type 2 diabetes mellitus patients aged more than 40 years. Thorough history of patients including age, smoking history, history of symptoms of peripheral arterial disease, complete physical examination and routine investigations were collected at the time of enrolment for all subjects. A ratio of the highest blood pressure from the posterior tibial or pedal arteries of each leg to the highest blood pressure from the brachial arteries < 0.9 was considered abnormal. Abnormal ABIs were found in 33% (66/200) patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. 45.5% patients had ABI 0.80-0.89, 33.3% patients had ABI 0.50-0.79 and 21.2% patients had ABI <0.5 Prevalence of peripheral vascular disease in type 2 diabetes mellitus is on rise in northern India so there is need to educate the patients regarding risk factor modification and importance of early intervention to prevent future progression of peripheral vascular disease.

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