In the last decades, the prevalence of obesity increased dramatically worldwide. According to the WHO, 2.1 billion people (30% of the population) around the world are obese or overweight. Effective ways to decrease food intake are needed. Evidence from emerging studies indicates an association between feeding behavior and the IL-6 expression in the central nervous system (CNS). The study aimed to investigate the effect of IL-6 modulation on feeding behavior and learning and memory process in the ventral hippocampus (vHPC). To implement this aim two groups of rats were used, the first group was exposed to the reduction of the IL-6 expression (knockdown), whereas the other one to microinjections of exogenous IL-6 (EX IL-6). Both experimental groups were subjected to a set of behavioral and molecular tests specific for investigating memory process, emotional/affective behavior and food intakes like novel object recognition, Morris water maze, and social interaction test. The results for IL-6 knockdown (KD) showed improvement in the short term memory, but did not affect the food intake. On the other hand, EX IL-6 caused an increase in the locomotor’s activity and the food intake during the 24 hours, but at the same time caused impairment in the spatial and learning memory. Taken together, these results provide new insight on the role of IL-6 outside of inflammation highlighting its ability to modulate hippocampus-dependent mnemonic process, and affective and feeding behaviors in the vHPC, however several questions still remain not addressed and the study require further investigation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:his-20507 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Abuamra, Ola A. E. |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Skövde, Institutionen för biovetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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