Systemic immune activation leads to neuroinflammation and sickness behavior in mice

Substantial evidence indicates an association between clinical depression and altered immune function. Systemic administration of bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is commonly used to study inflammation-associated behavioral changes in rodents. In these experiments, we tested the hypothesis that peripheral immune activation leads to neuroinflammation and depressive-like behavior in mice. We report that systemic administration of LPS induced astrocyte activation in transgenic GFAP-luc mice and increased immunoreactivity against the microglial marker ionized calcium-binding adapter molecule 1 in the dentate gyrus of wild-type mice. Furthermore, LPS treatment caused a strong but transient increase in cytokine levels in the serum and brain. In addition to studying LPS-induced neuroinflammation, we tested whether sickness could be separated from depressive-like behavior by evaluating LPS-treated mice in a panel of behavioral paradigms. Our behavioral data indicate that systemic LPS administration caused sickness and mild depressive-like behavior. However, due to the overlapping time course and mild effects on depression-related behavior per se, it was not possible to separate sickness from depressive-like behavior in the present rodent model.