Abstract
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.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 39-43 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | NeuroReport |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 19 2005 |
Keywords
- Atrophy
- Brain
- CA3
- High fat diet
- Hippocampus
- Psychological stress
- Synergy
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Neuroscience