| First Author | Denmark A | Year | 2010 |
| Journal | Behav Brain Res | Volume | 208 |
| Issue | 2 | Pages | 553-9 |
| PubMed ID | 20060021 | Mgi Jnum | J:157868 |
| Mgi Id | MGI:4437183 | Doi | 10.1016/j.bbr.2009.12.041 |
| Citation | Denmark A, et al. (2010) The effects of chronic social defeat stress on mouse self-grooming behavior and its patterning. Behav Brain Res 208(2):553-9 |
| abstractText | Stress induced by social defeat is a strong modifier of animal anxiety and depression-like phenotypes. Self-grooming is a common rodent behavior, and has an ordered cephalo-caudal progression from licking of the paws to head, body, genitals and tail. Acute stress is known to alter grooming activity levels and disrupt its patterning. Following 15-17 days of chronic social defeat stress, grooming behavior was analyzed in adult male C57BL/6J mice exhibiting either dominant or subordinate behavior. Our study showed that subordinate mice experience higher levels of anxiety and display disorganized patterning of their grooming behaviors, which emerges as a behavioral marker of chronic social stress. These findings indicate that chronic social stress modulates grooming behavior in mice, thus illustrating the importance of grooming phenotypes for neurobehavioral stress research. |
