Early environmental enrichment (EE) can impact many facets of an organism's existence, including significant alterations in neural and immune function. The brain and the immune system interact with one another in a variety of ways and immune challenges may interfere with learning and memory. We examined the possible role of EE in abrogating the negative effects of an innate immune challenge on learning and memory and sickness behavior.
We hypothesized that enriched animals will show diminished sickness behavior in a burrowing task after endotoxin exposure (lipopolysaccharide or LPS at a dose of 50ug/kg) versus control animals housed in standard cages. Furthermore, we hypothesized that exposure to EE will lead to fewer learning and memory deficits in a shuttlebox task following exposure to LPS (250 ug/kg). We found that EE appears not to protect against LPS-induced learning deficits and that EE does not ameliorate the effect of LPS on sickness behavior.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TCU/oai:etd.tcu.edu:etd-11062008-113730 |
| Date | 06 November 2008 |
| Creators | McLinden, Kristina Ashley |
| Contributors | Gary W Boehm |
| Publisher | Texas Christian University |
| Source Sets | Texas Christian University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/msword |
| Source | http://etd.tcu.edu/etdfiles/available/etd-11062008-113730/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to TCU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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