We examined voluntary wheel running and forced treadmill running exercise performance of wild-type mice and mice null for the desmin gene. When given access to a cage wheel, desmin null mice spent less time running and ran less far than wild-type mice. Wild-type mice showed a significant training effect with prolonged voluntary wheel running, as evidenced by an increase in mean running speed ac...

Running wheel access and resulting voluntary exercise alter food intake and reduce body weight. The neural mechanisms underlying these effects are unclear. In this study, we first assessed the effects of 7 days of running wheel access on food intake, body weight, and hypothalamic gene expression. We demonstrate that running wheel access significantly decreases food intake and body weight and re...

Selective breeding for high wheel-running activity has generated four lines of laboratory house mice (S lines) that run about 170% more than their control counterparts (C lines) on a daily basis, mostly because they run faster. We tested whether maximum aerobic metabolic rates (V(O2max)) have evolved in concert with wheel-running, using 48 females from generation 35. Voluntary activity and meta...

Most preclinical pain models rely on short-duration stimulus-evoked hind paw measurements even though chronic pain is usually a day and night experience. Pain is a debilitating condition that influences the sociability and the ability for voluntary tasks, but the relevant behavioral readouts for these aspects are mostly underrepresented in the literature. Moreover, we lack standardization in mo...

Voluntary wheel running and open-field behavior are probably the two most widely used measures of locomotion in laboratory rodents. We tested whether these two behaviors are correlated in mice using two approaches: the phylogenetic comparative method using inbred strains of mice and an ongoing artificial selection experiment on voluntary wheel running. After taking into account the measurement ...

Background. Previous surveys have shown that motor deficits precede the classical motor symptoms seen in Parkinson’s disease (PD) and that physical exercise may have beneficial effects on PD. Objectives. Here, we evaluated the potential of voluntary exercise to improve motor deficit in experimentally-induced Parkinson’s disease (6-OHDA) rats. Methods. Forty adult Wistar rats were ...

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a psychiatric illness characterized by excessively restricted caloric intake and abnormally high levels of physical activity. A challenging illness to treat, due to the lack of understanding of the underlying neurobiology, AN has the highest mortality rate among psychiatric illnesses. To address this need, neuroscientists are using an animal model to study how neural ci...

20 Involuntary exercising rats undergo more physical and mental stress than voluntary exercising 21 rats; however these findings still lack electrophysiological evidence. Many studies have reported 22 that theta rhythm appears when there is mental stress and that it is affected by emotional status. 23 Thus, we hypothesized that the differences between voluntary and involuntary movement should 2...

According to epidemiologic studies, a negative correlation exists between exercise amount and subsequent cancer development risk in the large intestine. The proportion of secondary bile acids (SBA) in the large intestine is related to subsequent risk for colorectal carcinogenesis. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of voluntary wheel running exercise and dietary intervention o...

The present study was performed to investigate the involvement of SNARK in physical activity levels in mice. To examine the acute effect of SNARK deficiency on voluntary running, Snark-deficient mice (Snark(+/-): n = 16) and their wild-type counterparts (Snark(+/+): n = 16) were assigned to sedentary or exercise (1 wk voluntary wheel running) groups. In addition, to clarify the differences in v...