We will study the immune cells of the brain in a model for high anxiety/depression. The model is developed by selective breeding. Animals are tested by the elevated plus maze test at the age of 7 weeks. This test lasts 5 minutes and measures anxiety-like behavior. The apparatus consists of closed and open arms. Animals with high anxiety tend to spent less time in the open arms (up to 10%) while normal anxiety animals tend to spent more time in the open arms (more than 30%). This way, animals were selected by their performance in the elavated plus maze and selectivly bred for high anxiety (HAB) and normal anxiety (NAB). In order to find biomarkers in the blood that let us know, what is going on in the brain, brain and blood cells need to be analyzed simultaniousely. This is not possible in human patients. Here, we can only analyze the blood. We aim to find biomarkers in the mouse blood that correlate with the state of the immune cells in the brain of HAB and NAB mice. This way, we can a) identify novel therapeutic targets and b) provide a marker to identify the sub-population of patients (by their blood compositon) that might benefit most from this therapeutic approach. The focus is here on the treatment-restistant population.
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