Aim: We aimed to explore the effect of high caloric diets on adolescent male rats to mimick the feeding behavior of human adolescents in the Western world.
Introduction: Age of high-caloric diet exposure is an important factor for the cognitive and anxiety outcomes as key processes of brain development and maturation occur during adolescence. Evidence shows high-caloric diets to affect differently learning and memory performance in an age-dependent way, being more detrimental to adolescent rats.
Methods: At 4 weeks of age, 30 adolescent male Wistar rats were randomly allocated to control, high-sugar (HS) and high-fat high-sugar (HFHS) diet groups during 4 weeks. After this period, behavioral tests were performed to study: (1) anxiety behavior in the elevated plus-maze (EPM) and open field tests, (2) learning and memory processes in the Morris water maze (MWM) and novel object recognition test, (3) fear response in fear conditioning tests and (4) depression state in forced swim test.
Results: Our results show that only HFHS-treated rats presented more anxiety than control rats, spending more time in the closed arms and less time in open arms of EPM. Moreover, HFHS-treated animals presented an impairment of spatial learning in the final phase of acquisition and an impairment of spatial memory, since these rats spend less time in the target quadrant of MWM and cross less times the former position of the platform. There were no differences between groups regarding locomotor activity, fear acquisition and memory, object novelty detection and exploration, and depression state.
Conclusion: In conclusion, anxiety behavior and spatial learning and memory are particularly affected by a cafeteria-type diet in young rats. This data confirms previous evidence reporting adolescence as a susceptible period of brain development to neural insults. Furthermore, the results show that there are different cognitive and emotional behavioral consequences between HS and HFHS diets.
Acknowledgements: This article was supported by ERDF through the operation POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007746 funded by the Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização – COMPETE2020 and by National Funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within CINTESIS, R&D Unit (reference UID/IC/4255/2013).