Treadmill Exercise Improves Behavioral and Neurobiological Alterations in Restraint-Stressed Rats.

Stress is a state that is known to impact an organism's physiological and psychological balance as well as the morphology and functionality of certain brain areas. In the present work, chronic restraint stress (CRS) model rats treated with treadmill exercise were used to examine anomalies associated to emotion and mood as well as molecular changes in the brain. Forty male Sprague-Dawley rats were divided into control, stress, exercise, and stress+exercise groups. CRS were exposed to stress group rats and exercise group underwent a chronic treadmill exercise. Depressive-like behavior was evaluated with the forced swim test (FST) and tail suspension test (TST). For assessing anxiety-like behavior, the light-dark test (LDT) and the open field test (OFT) were used. The Morris water maze test (MWMT) was used for testing memory and learning. Brain's monoamine level and the expression of genes related to stress were measured. It was discovered that CRS lengthens latency in the MWMT, increases immobility in the FST and TST, decreases time in the light compartment, and causes hypoactivity in the OFT. CRS reduced the dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens(NAc). Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), dopamine receptors, and serotonin receptor (HTR2A) gene expression in the prefrontal cortex, corpus striatum, and hypothalamus were decreased by CRS. Exercise on a treadmill leads to increase NAc's dopamine and noradrenaline levels and prevented behavioral alterations. Exercise increased the alterations of BDNF expressions in the brain in addition to improving behavior. As a result, CRS-induced behavioral impairments were effectively reversed by chronic treadmill exercise with molecular alterations in the brain.

TRPM2 may be involved in high fructose corn syrup-induced anxiety-like behavior in adult male rats.

Excessive high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) consumption is known to cause oxidative stress, which induces transient receptor potential melastatin type 2 (TRPM2) channel gating. Oxidative stress-induced TRPM2 gating is suggested to play an important role in neurons, indicating a role for the TRPM2 channel in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders including depression and anxiety. We investigated the effects of HFCS and chronic immobilization stress (CIS) on TRPM2 channel immunoreactivity, anxiety, and depressive-like behaviors in adult male rats. The male rats (n=8/group) were divided into 4 groups: Control, 20% HFCS (F20), 40% HFCS (F40), and stress. The control group received tap water, and F20 and F40 groups were exposed to HFCS 20% and 40% respectively for 14 consecutive days. Rats in the stress group were subjected to immobilization stress for 3 or 6 hours daily in the first and second weeks to induce CIS. Then, light/dark tests, open field tests (OFT), and tail suspension tests (TST) were performed, respectively. In the light/dark test, the time spent in the dark chamber significantly increased in all groups vs the control group (P<0.01). In support of this result, time spent in the light chamber significantly decreased in all groups vs the control group (P<0.01). Besides, CIS significantly increased depressive-like behavior in the stress group vs the control group (P<0.05). In serum hormone levels, corticosterone (CORT) levels significantly increased in the F40 and stress groups vs the control group (P<0.01). TRPM2 immunoreactivity significantly increased in the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex (PFC), nucleus accumbens (NaC), and amygdala regions by HFCS and CIS treatments. For the first time in the present study,  showed that f increased immunoreactivity of the TRPM2 cation channels may be linked to the anxiety-like behavior induced by HFCS.

Treadmill exercise has healing effects on obesity-induced sexual behavior disorder through kisspeptin and kiss1R expression in male rats.

The basic objective of this study was to examine the possible effects of treadmill exercise on obesity-related sexual behavior disorder in obese male rats and the role of kisspeptin in this effect. The rats were separated from their mothers at the age of 3 weeks, and classified into four groups as Control (C): normal diet-sedentary group, Exercise (E): normal diet-exercise group, Obese (O): high-fat diet-sedentary group, Obese + Exercise (O+E): high-fat diet-exercise grouSexual behavioral testing was conducted in the rats. At the end of the study, brain samples were taken from the animals for gene expression analyses. The treadmill exercise caused a significant increase in the O+E Group compared to the O Group in kisspeptin and kiss1R gene expression and in EF, ML, IL, MF, IF, III, EL, PEI, IR1, MFT, IFT, IRT sexual behavior parameters (p<0.05), and a significant decrease in ML, IL, III, EL sexual behavior parameters (p<0.05). Treadmill exercise caused a significant decrease in EF, ML, IL, MF, IF, III, EL, PEI, IR1, MFT, IFT, IRT sexual behavior parameters and kisspeptin and kiss1R gene expression in the hypothalamus, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and corpus striatum in E Group compared to C Group (p<0.05), and a significant increase in ML, IL, III, EL sexual behavior parameters (p<0.05). Based on this effect, we believe that it is caused by an increase in kisspeptin and kiss1R expression in the hypothalamus, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and corpus striatum. In conclusion, treadmill exercise-induced kisspeptin secretion may increase GnRH secretion and cause hypothalamo-pituitary gonadal axis activation and ameliorative effect on deteriorated sexual function.

The Effects of Chronic Asprosin Administration on Sense of Smell and Sexual Behavior in Female Rats.

INTRODUCTION: Asprosin is an adipokine released from white adipose tissue during fasting and acts through the olfactory receptor. It is known that adipokines play roles in reproductive physiology in mammals. However, there are very few studies conducted on role of asprosin in reproductive functions. There are no studies on its relationship with sexual motivation. It was shown in the literature that administration of asprosin to male mice improves olfaction. It is also known that there is a strong correlation between smell and sexual desire. In view of this, it was hypothesized that chronic administration of asprosin would improve olfactory performance and increase sexual incentive motivation in female rats for male partners. METHODS: This hypothesis was tested by applying the hidden cookie test, sexual incentive test, active research test, and sexual behavior test. The changes in serum hormone levels in female rats that chronically received asprosin were also measured and compared. RESULTS: Chronic asprosin exposure increased olfactory performance, male preference ratio, male investigation preference ratio, activity index, and anogenital investigation behavior. Also, serum oxytocin and estradiol levels increased following chronic administration of asprosin in female rats. CONCLUSION: These data suggest that chronic administration of asprosin can result in increased sexual incentive motivation for opposite sex in female rats over increased olfactory performance and changes in reproductive hormones.

Automated Adrenal Gland Disease Classes Using Patch-Based Center Symmetric Local Binary Pattern Technique with CT Images.

Incidental adrenal masses are seen in 5% of abdominal computed tomography (CT) examinations. Accurate discrimination of the possible differential diagnoses has important therapeutic and prognostic significance. A new handcrafted machine learning method has been developed for the automated and accurate classification of adrenal gland CT images. A new dataset comprising 759 adrenal gland CT image slices from 96 subjects were analyzed. Experts had labeled the collected images into four classes: normal, pheochromocytoma, lipid-poor adenoma, and metastasis. The images were preprocessed, resized, and the image features were extracted using the center symmetric local binary pattern (CS-LBP) method. CT images were next divided into 16 × 16 fixed-size patches, and further feature extraction using CS-LBP was performed on these patches. Next, extracted features were selected using neighborhood component analysis (NCA) to obtain the most meaningful ones for downstream classification. Finally, the selected features were classified using k-nearest neighbor (kNN), support vector machine (SVM), and neural network (NN) classifiers to obtain the optimum performing model. Our proposed method obtained an accuracy of 99.87%, 99.21%, and 98.81% with kNN, SVM, and NN classifiers, respectively. Hence, the kNN classifier yielded the highest classification results with no pathological image misclassified as normal. Our developed fixed patch CS-LBP-based automatic classification of adrenal gland pathologies on CT images is highly accurate and has low time complexity [Formula: see text]. It has the potential to be used for screening of adrenal gland disease classes with CT images.