Research Paper Volume 9, Issue 11 pp 2269—2287
Psychological stress exposure to aged mice causes abnormal feeding patterns with changes in the bout number
- 1 Tsumura Research Laboratories, Tsumura & Co., Ibaraki, Japan
Received: July 20, 2017 Accepted: November 2, 2017 Published: November 9, 2017
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101320How to Cite
Copyright: Yamada et al. This is an open‐access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Stress responses are affected by aging. However, studies on stress-related changes in feeding patterns with aging subject are minimal. We investigated feeding patterns induced by two psychological stress models, revealing characteristics of stress-induced feeding patterns as "meal" and "bout" (defined as the minimum feeding behavior parameters) in aged mice. Feeding behaviors of C57BL/6J mice were monitored for 24 h by an automatic monitoring device. Novelty stress reduced the meal amount over the 24 h in both young and aged mice, but as a result of a time course study it was persistent in aged mice. In addition, the decreased bout number was more pronounced in aged mice than in young mice. The 24-h meal and bout parameters did not change in either the young or aged mice following water avoidance stress (WAS). However, the meal amount and bout number increased in aged mice for 0–6 h after WAS exposure but remained unchanged in young mice. Our findings suggest that changes in bout number may lead to abnormal stress-related feeding patterns and may be one tool for evaluating eating abnormality in aged mice.