Optimized animal model to mimic the reality of stress-induced depression in the clinic

BACKGROUND: Animal models are useful tools for verifying the relationship between stress and depression; however, an operational criterion for excluding the resilient animals from the analysis has not been established yet, which hinders the model’s ability to more accurately mimic the scenario in humans. METHODS: To induce depression-like symptoms, rats received maternal deprivation (MD) during PND1–14, and/or chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) exposure. The latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to determine latent subgroups in treatment naive adult rats. The percentile method was used to distinguish sensitive and non-sensitive behaviors in rats. RESULTS: The sucrose preference rate of treatment naive adult rats was fit using a Beta distribution, while immobility time was fit using a Gamma distribution. Indexes of behavioral tests revealed the 4-class model as the best fit for treatment naive adult rats. The incidence of stress-resilience in MD rats was significantly higher than that in CUS rats and MD + CUS rats. There was a significantly higher incidence of stress-resilience in CUS rats compared with MD + CUS rats. Recovery rate of anhedonia-like and sub anhedonia-like behaviors in CUS rats was significantly higher than that in MD and MD + CUS rats. There was a significantly higher recovery rate of anhedonia-like behaviors in MD rats compared to MD + CUS rats. CONCLUSIONS: The percentile method is suitable for setting up an operational cutoff to classify depression-like, sub depression-like, and resilient behaviors in rats exposed to MD and CUS.