Assessing the effects of stress on feeding behaviors in laboratory mice.

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.

Francois M ，Canal Delgado I ，Shargorodsky N ，Leu CS ，Zeltser L ... -  《eLife》

A Framework for Developing Translationally Relevant Animal Models of Stress-Induced Changes in Eating Behavior.

Stress often affects eating behaviors, leading to increased eating in some individuals and decreased eating in others. Identifying physiological and psychological factors that determine the direction of eating responses to stress has been a major goal of epidemiological and clinical studies. However, challenges of standardizing the stress exposure in humans hinder efforts to uncover the underlying mechanisms. The issue of what determines the direction of stress-induced feeding responses has not been directly addressed in animal models, but assays that combine stress with a feeding-related task are commonly used as readouts of other behaviors, such as anxiety. Sex, estrous cyclicity, circadian cyclicity, caloric restriction, palatable diets, elevated body weight, and properties of the stressors similarly influence feeding behavior in humans and rodent models. Yet, most rodent studies do not use conditions that are most relevant for studying feeding behavior in humans. This review proposes a conceptual framework for incorporating these influences to develop reproducible and translationally relevant assays to study effects of stress on food intake. Such paradigms have the potential to uncover links between emotional eating and obesity as well as to the etiology of eating disorders.

François M ，Fernández-Gayol O ，Zeltser LM 《-》

An open-source device for measuring food intake and operant behavior in rodent home-cages.

Matikainen-Ankney BA ，Earnest T ，Ali M ，Casey E ，Wang JG ，Sutton AK ，Legaria AA ，Barclay KM ，Murdaugh LB ，Norris MR ，Chang YH ，Nguyen KP ，Lin E ，Reichenbach A ，Clarke RE ，Stark R ，Conway SM ，Carvalho F ，Al-Hasani R ，McCall JG ，Creed MC ，Cazares V ，Buczynski MW ，Krashes MJ ，Andrews ZB ，Kravitz AV ... -  《eLife》

Timing of food intake is more potent than habitual voluntary exercise to prevent diet-induced obesity in mice.

Okauchi H ，Hashimoto C ，Nakao R ，Oishi K ... -  《-》

Development of, and recovery from, activity-based anorexia in female rats.

Dixon DP ，Ackert AM ，Eckel LA 《PHYSIOLOGY & BEHAVIOR》