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Enhancement of central availability of the second messenger CAMP is a promising approach to improve cognitive function. Pharmacological inhibition of phosphodiesterase type 4 (PDE4), a group of cAMP hydrolyzing enzymes in the brain, has been shown to improve cognitive performances in rodents and monkeys. However, inhibition of PDE4 is generally associated with severe emetic side-effects. Roflumilast, an FDA-approved PDE4 inhibitor for treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), is yielding only mild emetic side effects. In the present study we investigate the potential of roflumilast as a cognition enhancer and to determine the potential coinciding emetic response in comparison to rolipram, a classic PDE4 inhibitor with pronounced emetic effects. Cognition enhancement was evaluated in mice and it was found that both roflumilast and rolipram enhanced memory in an object location task (0.03 mg/kg), whereas only roflumilast was effective in a spatial Y-maze (0.1 mg/kg). Emetic potential was measured using competition of PDE4 inhibition for alpha 2-adrenergic receptor antagonism in which recovery from xylazine/ketamine-mediated anesthesia is used as a surrogate marker. While rolipram displayed emetic properties at a dose 10 times the memory-enhancing dose, roflumilast only showed increased emetic-like properties at a dose 100 times the memory-enhancing dose. Moreover, combining sub-efficacious doses of the approved cognition enhancer donepezil and roflumilast, which did not improve memory when given alone, fully restored object recognition memory deficit in rats induced by the muscarinic receptor antagonist scopolamine. These findings suggest that roflumilast offers a more favorable window for treatment of cognitive deficits compared to rolipram. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Takeda (Deerfield, USA) funded the combination therapy study and participated in its design.

Drug effects are usually evaluated in animals housed under maximally standardized conditions. However, it is assumed that an enriched environment (EE) more closely resembles human conditions as compared to maximally standardized laboratory conditions. In the present study, we examined the acute cognition enhancing effects of vardenafil, a PDE5 inhibitor, which stimulates protein kinase G/CREB signaling in cells, in three different groups of male Wistar rats tested in an object recognition task (ORT). Rats were either housed solitarily (SOL) or socially (SOC) under standard conditions, or socially in an EE. Although EE animals remembered object information longer in the vehicle condition, vardenafil only improved object memory in SOL and SOC animals. While EE animals had a heavier dorsal hippocampus, we found no differences between experimental groups in total cell numbers in the dentate gyrus, CA2-3 or CA1. Neither were there any differences in markers for pre- and postsynaptic density. No changes in PDE5 mRNA- and protein expression levels were observed. Basal pCREB levels were increased in EE rats only, whereas beta-catenin was not affected, suggesting specific activation of the MAP kinase signaling pathway and not the AKT pathway. A possible explanation for the inefficacy of vardenafil could be that CREB signaling is already optimally stimulated in the hippocampus of EE rats. Since previous data has shown that acute PDE5 inhibition does not improve memory performance in humans, the use of EE animals could be considered as a more valid model for testing cognition enhancing drugs.