Combination of high fat diet and chronic stress retracts hippocampal dendrites.
Adult male rats were fed a low or high fat diet and given psychosocial stress (crowded and unstable housing with daily predator exposure) for 3 weeks. Neither stress nor high fat diet, alone, produced dendritic atrophy; only the group given the combination of stress and high fat diet developed a reduction of the length and number of branch points of apical dendrites of CA3 neurons. These findings indicate that a synergy between high fat diet and stress caused a retraction of CA3 dendrites. The findings are consistent with work on peripheral (e.g., cardiovascular) systems demonstrating a synergy between stress and high fat diet, and are relevant toward understanding how diet and stress interact to adversely affect brain and memory processing.
Baran
Sarah E
SE
Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1104, USA.
Campbell
Adam M
AM
Kleen
Jonathan K
JK
Foltz
Cainan H
CH
Wright
Ryan L
RL
Diamond
David M
DM
Conrad
Cheryl D
CD
D000818:Animals; D001835:Body Weight; D003441:Crowding / Q000503:physiopathology; D003712:Dendrites / Q000502:physiology*; D004041:Dietary Fats; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000502:physiology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D008297:Male; D017966:Pyramidal Cells / Q000502:physiology*; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000503:physiopathology*
D004041:Dietary Fats