Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 116, Issue 19, Pages 9644-9651Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1820832116
Keywords
contextual fear conditioning; novel object recognition; gut microbiota; memory; SCFA
Categories
Funding
- Italian Ministry of Education, Universities, and Research/European Research Area-Healthy Diet for Healthy Life Project AMBROSIAC
- Science Foundation Ireland [15/JP-HDHL/3270]
- University of Florence [DR 175372-1210]
- Umberto Veronesi Foundation
- Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) [201511/2014-2]
- ERA-HDHL Project AMBROSIAC
- Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation
- Brazilian Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES Brazil) [001]
- CAPES Brazil [001]
- CNPq
- Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) [15/JP-HDHL/3270] Funding Source: Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)
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Psychological stress during adolescence may cause enduring cognitive deficits and anxiety in both humans and animals, accompanied by rearrangement of numerous brain structures and functions. A healthy diet is essential for proper brain development and maintenance of optimal cognitive functions during adulthood. Furthermore, nutritional components profoundly affect the intestinal community of microbes that may affect gut-brain communication. We adopted a relatively mild stress protocol, social instability stress, which when repeatedly administered to juvenile rats modifies cognitive behaviors and plasticity markers in the brain. We then tested the preventive effect of a prolonged diet enriched with the omega 3 polyunsaturated fatty acids eicosapentaenoic acid, docosahexaenoic acid, and docosapentaenoic acid and vitamin A. Our findings highlight the beneficial effects of this enriched diet on cognitive memory impairment induced by social instability stress, as stressed rats fed the enriched diet exhibited performance undistinguishable from that of nonstressed rats on both emotional and reference memory tests. Furthermore, in stressed rats, the decline in brain-derived neurotrophic factor expression in the hippocampus and shifts in the microbiota composition were normalized by the enriched diet. The detrimental behavioral and neurochemical effects of adolescent stress, as well as the protective effect of the enriched diet, were maintained throughout adulthood, long after the exposure to the stressful environment was terminated. Taken together, our results strongly suggest a beneficial role of nutritional components in ameliorating stress-related behaviors and associated neurochemical and microbiota changes, opening possible new venues in the field of nutritional neuropsychopharmacology.
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