Dana Suciu1, Alize E. H. Scheenstra2,
Jouke Dijkstra2, Melly Sylvana Oitzl3, Louise van der
Weerd, 1,4
1Radiology, LUMC, Leiden, Netherlands; 2Radiology
- Image processing, LUMC, Leiden, Netherlands; 3Medical
Pharmacology, LACDR, Leiden, Netherlands; 4Anatomy, LUMC, Leiden,
Netherlands
We
report a longitudinal MRI investigation on mice chronically exposed to stress
hormones (hypercorticism) to investigate hippocampal morphology. The mice
were implanted with a continuous corticosterone-releasing pellet (n=10) or a
placebo cholesterol pellet (n=10). T2W MRI scans of the mouse brain were
taken over several weeks. Volumetric analysis by manual delineation using
SPSS analysis and quantitative group-wise comparison using deformation fields
and a 3D Moore-Rayleigh test with Bonferroni correction were employed. Our
study demonstrated that chronic hypercorticism in mice indeed leads to volume
loss in the hippocampus, which is at least partially reversible after
recovery.