Effects of Continuously High Levels of Corticosteroids on Mouse Hippocampus a Longitudinal in Vivo MRI Study

Dana Suciu¹, Alize E. H. Scheenstra², Jouke Dijkstra², Melly Sylvana Oitzl³, Louise van der Weerd, ^1,4

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.