Age-related cognitive decline in spatial learning and memory of C57BL/6J mice
Jhana O. Hendrickx, Sofie De Moudt, Elke Calus, Peter Paul De Deyn, Debby Van Dam, Guido R.Y. De Meyer
Abstract
During the last decades, most of the preclinical neurodegenerative research was performed in mouse models of amyloidosis, tauopathies or α-synucleinopathies preferentially maintained on a C57BL/6J background. However, comprehensive neurobehavioural data from C57BL/6J mice outlining the critical point of spontaneous cognitive decline are incomplete. In this study, we aimed for the neurobehavioural phenotyping of hippocampus-dependent spatial learning and memory of aging C57BL/6J mice. Neurobehavioural phenotyping was performed by means of a Morris Water Maze (MWM) and a Novel Object Recognition (NOR) test. MWM measurements revealed signs of age-related memory loss in C57BL/6J animals from the age of 6 months onward. The NOR assessment strengthened latter finding by decreasing discrimination indexes (DI) and recognition indexes (RI) starting from the age of 6 months. Taken together, these findings contribute to the current knowledge of spontaneous cognitive behaviours of this perhaps most widely used mouse strain and serve as a benchmark for dementia mouse models to distinguish spontaneous from pathological neurodegenerative behaviour.