Elevated Plus Maze Sample Clauses

Elevated Plus Maze. We use the Elevated Plus Maze (EPM) as a way to look at exploratory and anxiolytic behavior in the mice. Occasionally, we have mice that move very little, or not at all, which shows the freezing response that rodents have when they are stressed. These mice normally get excluded with the outliers, because, typically, it will be a large duration of the time, sometimes the entire time, spent in one zone. Because of the dynamics of how the various zones of the EPM correlate to various environmental situations that would be encountered in the wild, we can assess the relative willingness that the animal has to explore or how much the animal wants to avoid a more dangerous environment. Behaviors can change throughout the estrous cycle, especially due to the rapid changes in the ratio of progesterone to estrogen that occur during proestrus and estrus (Maeng & Milad, 2015). We were curious about the impact that higher relative levels of circulating progesterone and its metabolites have on anxiety-related behavior in the context of the rapid tolerance to the anxiolytic effects of alcohol. We hypothesized that higher levels of circulating progesterone and its metabolites as seen in diestrus would result in a development of rapid tolerance to the anxiolytic effects of alcohol, due to the system being already prepped for relatively higher levels of these metabolites. In estrus females, the neural systems are not adjusted to relatively higher progesterone levels, meaning the development would not occur as quickly. In males, we expected to see a development of rapid tolerance in the anxiolytic effects of alcohol, similar to that seen in the experiment carried out in rats by ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ in 2012. The initial experiment which looked at the effects of one 1g/kg dose of either saline or ethanol on behavior in the elevated plus maze, showed surprising results in the decrease of time spent in the open arms by the male mice who were exposed to ethanol as compared to those exposed to saline (Fig. 1a). This contradicts previous information and understandings about behavior, but this could also simply be an anomaly due to a very low sample size and individual variability. The females a slight increase in anxiolytic behavior with administration of ethanol compared to saline, which is the results that were anticipated by both sexes, based on previous findings. The data that was divided between sexes, with no regard for hormone status, showed us the first instance of rapid sensitization...