Behavioral phenotypes of the mouse that was housed together with an epileptic conspecific

Abstract

Psychosocial environment is one of the important factors that affecting one’s personality and even contributes to cause and deterioration of mental disorder. In this issue, there have been several clinical researches that focused on relationship between the brain disease patient and the related people like family or caregiver because of the direct social influence from the patient. However, despite the clinical importance, there is no analytic research covering it. In this thesis, I reconstituted this situation using pilocarpine-induced epilepsy model as a role of the brain disease patient with abnormal social behaviors. A normal mouse was paired the epilepsy model as like caregiver or family of the patient. The cagemate of epilepsy model showed depressive, anxious, dysfunction in social behavior and memory. The effect of housing with brain disease model was coincident with clinical finding, and relevant to actual psychosocial effect. Further study about connection between limbic areas is currently in motion by measuring EEG.