The effect of adolescent treadmill mandatory exercise on symptoms of depression and brain inflammatory responses following maternal separation stress in mature male rats

Early life stressful events have detrimental effects on brain and behavior associated with development of depression. Also immune-inflammatory responses have been reported to contribute in pathophysiology of depression and many studies have indicated the beneficial effects of physical activity against stress. This study aimed to determine the effect of adolescent treadmill mandatory exercise on symptoms of depression and brain inflammatory responses following maternal separation stress in mature male rats.

In this work, we applied maternal separation (MS), as a valid animal model of early life adversity, to rats from postnatal day (PND) 2 to 14 for 180 min per day. At PND 28, male Wistar albino rats were randomly divided into 4 experimental groups: control, MS, treadmill mandatory exercise (TM), and fluoxetine. At PND 60, depressive-like behaviors were assessed using behavioral tests including forced swimming test (FST), splash test , sucrose preference test (SPT), and open field test. Also, real-time PCR was used for assessment of IL-6, IL-1βý genes expression in hippocampal samples.

Our result revealed that depressive-like behaviors following MS stress significantly caused depressive-like behaviors which were treated only in fluoxetine group (p

Although, mandatory physical exercise during adolescence is not able to change depressive-like behaviors, itý can make changes in cellular and molecular level.