Experimental gerontology
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Experimental gerontology · Aug 2012
Anhedonic-like traits and lack of affective deficits in 18-month-old C57BL/6 mice: Implications for modeling elderly depression.
The prevalence of depression increases with aging. We hypothesized that like humans, old animals exhibit anhedonic-like behavior, along with signs of behavioral despair. In rodents, anhedonia, a reduced sensitivity to reward, which is listed as a core feature of major depression in the DSM-IVR, can be measured by a decrease in intake of and preference for sweet solutions. ⋯ Meanwhile, young and old mice showed no differences in the parameters of behavioral despair evaluated in the forced swim and modified tail suspension tests. Thus, the behavioral profile of aged mice parallels that of humans with elderly depression, in whom the symptoms of hedonic deficits typically outweigh affective disturbances. The assessment of anhedonic-like traits with the sucrose preference test in 18-month-old mice will be useful in preclinical studies of elderly depression.
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Experimental gerontology · Aug 2012
Genetic variation for stress-response hormesis in C. elegans lifespan.
Increased lifespan can be associated with greater resistance to many different stressors, most notably thermal stress. Such hormetic effects have also been found in C. elegans where short-term exposure to heat lengthens the lifespan. Genetic investigations have been carried out using mutation perturbations in a single genotype, the wild type Bristol N2. ⋯ The ability to recover from heat-shock mapped to a significant QTL on chromosome II which overlapped with a QTL for offspring under heat-shock conditions. The QTL was confirmed by introgressing relatively small CB4856 regions into chromosome II of N2. Our observations show that there is natural variation in hormetic effects on C. elegans lifespan for heat-shock and that this variation is genetically determined.