Spreading depolarization (SD) temporarily shuts down neural processing in nervous systems with effective blood brain barriers. In mammals this is usually pathological in response to energetic stress. In insects a very similar process is induced by abiotic environmental stressors and can be beneficial by conserving energy. Age is a critical factor for predicting the consequences of SD in humans. We investigated the effect of aging on SD in an insect model of SD and explored the contribution of oxidative stress. Aging slowed the recovery of intact locusts from asphyxia by water submersion. In semi-intact preparations we monitored SD by recording the DC potential across the blood brain barrier in response to bath application of the Na+/K+-ATPase inhibitor, ouabain. Treatment with ouabain induced changes to the DC potential that could be separated into two distinct components: a slow, permanent negative shift, similar to the negative ultraslow potential recorded in mammals and human patients, as well as rapid, reversible negative DC shifts (SD events). Aging had no effect on the slow shift but increased the duration of SD events from ~0.6 minutes in young locusts to ~0.9 minutes in old ones. This was accompanied by a decrease in the rate of recovery of DC potential at the end of the SD event, from ~1.5 mV/s (young) to ~0.6 mV/s (old). An attempt to generate oxidative stress using rotenone was unsuccessful, but pretreatment with the antioxidant, N-acetylcysteine amide, had opposite effects to those of aging, reducing duration (control ~1.1 minutes, NACA ~0.7 minutes) and increasing rate of recovery (control ~0.5 mV/s, NACA ~1.0 mV/s) suggesting that it prevented oxidative damage occurring during the ouabain treatment. The antioxidant also reduced the rate of the slow negative shift. We propose that the aging locust nervous system is more vulnerable to stress due to a prior accumulation of oxidative damage. Our findings also strengthen the notion that insects provide useful models for the investigation of cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying SD in mammals.
