ENVIRONMENTAL CNS STIMULATION IN AGING, HEALTH AND DISEASE

Social and environmental factors have profound impacts on health and diseases across the lifespan. Each year, hundreds of millions of animals are used in biomedical research. Yet many experimental studies utilize animals housed in standard conditions conferring minimal physical, social, and mental stimulation. Lacking appreciation of macroenvironment impacts on physiology and disease risks of the laboratory animals may not only hinder the use of appropriate animal models for human diseases, but also question the validity of preclinical assessments of therapeutic agents.This book summarizes our work on environmental enrichment, a housing condition for laboratory animals, recapitulating an active lifestyle by providing a complex physical, social, and cognitive stimulations. Environmental enrichment exerts a wide range of benefits on energy balance, cancer, immunity, stress, behavior, and healthy aging. One underlying mechanism is the activation of a specific neuroendocrine brain-adipocyte axis with brain-derived neurotrophic factor as the key brain mediator. This book integrates recent discoveries regarding mechanisms, mediators, and biomarkers of environmental enrichment, and discusses its translational potential.By providing a timely review and discussion of murine models, this book should be of interest to basic, translational, and clinical researchers, as well as psychologists, nutrition scientists, and students that have interest in cancer, obesity, aging, and genetic disorders.Contents: Environmental Enrichment: A Model of an Active Lifestyle Cancer and Macroenvironment: What is the Brain–Cancer Connection? Environment, Stress and Obesity: A Brain-Fat Axis for Prevention and Treatment of Obesity and Metabolic Syndromes Gene Therapy for Obesity and Associated Metabolic Syndrome Hypothalamic-Sympathoneural-Adipocyte Axis Activation Targets Both Obesity and Cancer Environmental Enrichment Fine-Tunes Immunity in Cancer and Autoimmune Disease Environmental Enrichment Promotes Healthy Aging Environmental Enrichment as a Eustress Model: Identifying Brain Mediators Distinguishing Eustress and Distress Impact on Cancer Why We Should Care about Laboratory Animal Housing: Implications of Environmental Enrichment Studies in Biomedical Research Readership: Clinical researchers, psychologists, nutrition scientists and students that have interest in cancer, obesity, aging, and genetic disorders.Environmental Enrichment;Brain;Cancer;Obesity;Immunity;Aging;Stress;Gene Therapy0Key Features: Written by the pioneers in identifying brain mechanisms regulating systemic physiology and diseases Contains new perspectives to the preclinical studies using laboratory animals that are potentially relevant to all biomedical research Contains some of the most innovative gene therapy approaches