Poster abstracts
Poster number 75 submitted by Jackie Anderson
Social isolation worsens diet-induced obesity and alters metabolic and inflammatory markers in the hypothalamus
Jacqueline M. Anderson (Neuroscience Graduate Program), Nicholas J. Queen, Rhiannon Bates, Wei Huang, Suraj Komatineni (Department of Cancer Biology & Genetics, College of Medicine, The Ohio State University), Xiaokui Mo (Department of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, The Ohio State University), Anthony G. Mansour, Run Xiao, Logan A. Chrislip, Lei Cao (Department of Cancer Biology & Genetics, College of Medicine, The Ohio State University)
Abstract:
Social isolation (SI) is a risk factor for a variety of chronic diseases, including obesity and metabolic syndromes. Disruptions in hypothalamic function have been implicated in both social isolation and obesity, but underlying hypothalamic mechanisms for how social isolation may affect the development of obesity have not been extensively researched. Additionally, the majority of murine studies are performed under room-temperature conditions. Mice that are singly housed are unable to socially thermoregulate, thereby potentially exacerbating chronic cold stress and masking the effects of psychosocial stress. Here, we placed SI-housed and group-housed mice under thermoneutral (TN) conditions and fed them a high-fat diet (HFD) to determine the impact of SI on the development of obesity and on the hypothalamus. We found that SI worsened metabolic outcomes and altered metabolic and inflammatory hypothalamic markers, including downregulation of Bdnf and Mc4r expression. Interestingly, we found that SI downregulated several genes involved in the neuroinflammatory response. In a subset of normal chow-fed mice exposed to acute SI, we subjected the hypothalamus and amygdala to a microarray and transcriptomic analysis to examine early brain changes in response to SI. Acute SI altered the transcriptome of the hypothalamus and amygdala, with Hdc and Fos being highly induced by SI. Current experiments are underway to further investigate the hypothalamic inflammatory response to SI and HFD as well as experiments to explore the involvement of HDC in the SI phenotype.
Keywords: social isolation, obesity, hypothalamus