Depression Behavior Tests
Ace Therapeutics is committed to providing customers with a variety of classic behavioral tests to assess depression. Our tests leverage behavioral tests of reward, exploration, and hopelessness to help you gain insight into the mechanisms of action in depression-related disorders.
Introduction of Depression Behavior Tests
Depression, a long-standing heterogeneous neuropsychiatric disorder, is one of the most common psychiatric disorders, imposing a huge economic burden on public health and reducing the quality of life of individuals. Different rodent models have shown high apparent efficacy against human depression and are used in preclinical studies. Animal models of human behavior represent a complex of cognitive and/or emotional processes that translate from animal to human. Behavioral testing is primarily and exclusively used to validate and support cognitive or affective theories, and it can also be used to validate theories of psychopathology.
Fig. 1 General setup and behaviors of mice during the forced swim test. (Kraeuter AK, et al., 2019)
Depression Behavior Testing Services
Ace Therapeutics routinely conducts multiple tests to evaluate different components of depression in rodent models. For example, the tail suspension and forced swim tests measure hopelessness, novelty-suppressed feeding measures apathy, and the sucrose preference test assesses anhedonia. In addition, tests to measure anxiety, including open field, elevated plus maze, and light/dark compartments, among others, often complement depression testing. We are committed to providing animal behavioral tests that comprehensively characterize neuropsychiatric disorders.
The depression behavior tests we provide include but are not limited to the following:
| Test |
Description |
Interpretation |
Advantages |
| Forced Swim Test |
Place experimental animals in a closed environment from which there is no escape and force them to swim. |
When the experimental animals stopped struggling, they remained immobile for longer than they swam, considered to mimic a state of behavioural hopelessness. |
The predictive validity is very good. This test can be used to detect the effects of antidepressants. |
| Novelty-Suppressed Feeding |
An innate fear of novelty in rodents is used to inhibit feeding behavior induced by exposure to novelty factors. |
Anxious mice took longer to start eating. |
The facial effectiveness is very good. Chronic mild stress increases latency to approach food. |
| Sucrose Preference Test |
Animals have access to water without and with different concentrations of sucrose and then analyzed for preference rates. |
Mice should prefer the sweetened sucrose water, and mice that dislike it may be considered to exhibit anhedonia. |
The predictive validity is very good. Antidepressants can rescue sucrose preference, but only if the mice had been previously stressed. |
| Tail Suspension Test |
The mouse is suspended by its tail and its body is suspended in the air. The test takes about 6 minutes and can be repeated several times. |
A mouse remained immobile for longer than it attempted to correct itself, which is thought to simulate a state of behavioral desperation. |
The predictive validity is very good. Antidepressants often reduce the amount of time spent immobile. |
Applications
- Research on the mechanism of action of depression-related diseases.
- Mechanism of action of antidepressants.
- Screening and efficacy evaluation of antidepressant drugs.
Ace Therapeutics offers customizable behavioral tests to meet specific scientific needs. Please feel free to make an inquiry and let us know what you want to achieve. Our team of experts will be in touch with you shortly to discuss your needs.
Reference
- Kraeuter AK, Guest PC, Sarnyai Z. The Forced Swim Test for Depression-Like Behavior in Rodents. Methods Mol Biol. 2019, 1916:75-80.
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