Assessing the effects of stress on feeding behaviors in laboratory mice

Marie Francois, Isabella Canal Delgado, Nikolay Shargorodsky, Cheng Shiun Leu, Lori Zeltser

Résultat de rechercheexamen par les pairs

40 Citations (Scopus)

Résumé

Stress often affects eating behaviors, increasing caloric intake in some individuals and decreasing it in others. The determinants of feeding responses to stress are unknown, in part because this issue is rarely studied in rodents. We focused our efforts on the novelty-suppressed feeding (NSF) assay, which uses latency to eat as readout of anxiety-like behavior, but rarely assesses feeding per se. We explored how key variables in experimental paradigms – estrous and diurnal cyclicity, age and duration of social isolation, prandial state, diet palatability, and elevated body weight – influence stress-induced anxiety-like behavior and food intake in male and female C57BL/6J mice. Latency to eat in the novel environment is increased in both sexes across most of the conditions tested, while effects on caloric intake are variable. In the common NSF assay (i.e., lean mice in the light cycle), sex-specific effects of the length of social isolation, and not estrous cyclicity, are the main source of variability. Under conditions that are more physiologically relevant for humans (i.e., overweight mice in the active phase), the novel stress now elicits robust hyperphagia in both sexes . This novel model of stress eating can be used to identify underlying neuroendocrine and neuronal substrates. Moreover, these studies can serve as a framework to integrate cross-disciplinary studies of anxiety and feeding related behaviors in rodents.

Langue d'origineEnglish
Numéro d'articlee70271
JournaleLife
Volume11
DOI
Statut de publicationPublished - févr. 2022

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • General Neuroscience
  • General Biochemistry,Genetics and Molecular Biology
  • General Immunology and Microbiology

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