Oral Ingestion and Intraventricular Injection of Curcumin Attenuates the Effort-Related Effects of the VMAT-2 Inhibitor Tetrabenazine: Implications for Motivational Symptoms of Depression

Effort-related choice tasks are used for studying depressive motivational symptoms such as anergia/fatigue. These studies investigated the ability of the dietary supplement curcumin to reverse the low-effort bias induced by the monoamine storage blocker tetrabenazine. Tetrabenazine shifted effort-related choice in rats, decreasing high-effort lever pressing but increasing chow intake. The effects of tetrabenazine were reversed by oral ingestion of curcumin (80.0–160.0 mg/kg) and infusions of curcumin into the cerebral ventricles (2.0–8.0 μg). Curcumin attenuates the effort-related effects of tetrabenazine in this model via actions on the brain, suggesting that curcumin may be useful for treating human motivational symptoms