A diathesis-stress rat model induced suicide-implicated endophenotypes and prefrontal cortex abnormalities in the PKA and GABA receptor signaling pathways.

Teng Teng, Li Fan, Wei Yan, Xuemei Li, Yuqing Zhang, Yajie Xiang, Yuanliang Jiang, Kai Yuan, Bangmin Yin, Le Shi, Xueer Liu, Ying Yu, Xinyu Zhou, Lin Lu, Peng Xie

Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry 2022 Jun 08

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Suicide is one of the leading causes of death and represents a significant public health problem worldwide; however, the underlying mechanism of suicide remains unclear, and there is no animal model with suicide-implicated endophenotypes for investigating the etiology, course and potential treatment targets of suicide. Thus, we generated a diathesis-stress rat model to simulate suicide-implicated endophenotypes. First, two hundred rats were screened in two rounds of learned helplessness (LH) tests and selected as learned helplessness-sensitive (LHS) rats (n = 37) and learned helplessness-resistant (LHR) rats (n = 39). Then, all LHS rats and half of the rats (randomly selected) in the LHR group were exposed to four weeks of social defeat stress (SDS) (LHS + SDS group, n = 37 and LHR + SDS group, n = 20, respectively). The remainder of the LHR rats were handled as controls (LHR + CON group, n = 19). The LHS + SDS group showed significantly more suicide-implicated endophenotypes than the LHR + CON group, including longer immobile times in the forced swim test (hopelessness), higher scores in the irritability test (irritability), shorter latencies to attack (impulsivity), longer total attack times in the resident-intruder test (aggression), and lower sucrose preference indices (anhedonia). Proteomic analyses revealed that the canonical pathways that were the most common between the LHS + SDS and LHR + CON groups were the PKA and GABA receptor pathways in the prefrontal cortex. A diathesis-stress paradigm would be a useful way to establish a rat model with suicide-implicated endophenotypes, providing novel perspectives for revealing the potential mechanism of suicide. Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Citation

Teng Teng, Li Fan, Wei Yan, Xuemei Li, Yuqing Zhang, Yajie Xiang, Yuanliang Jiang, Kai Yuan, Bangmin Yin, Le Shi, Xueer Liu, Ying Yu, Xinyu Zhou, Lin Lu, Peng Xie. A diathesis-stress rat model induced suicide-implicated endophenotypes and prefrontal cortex abnormalities in the PKA and GABA receptor signaling pathways. Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry. 2022 Jun 08;116:110538