Effect of environmental enrichment and housing density on immune system reactivity to acute exercise stress

Positive stress has been described in the literature but not well characterized experimentally. This experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that environmental enrichment and housing density in C57BL/6 female mice modulate immune responses to acute exercise stress. A 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design was used where enrichment (enrich), nonenriched (nonenrich), group housed (group), individually housed (ind), and stress (stress) or no stress (nonstress) acted as the independent variables. Enrichment involved a 7-week exposure to in-cage running wheels and a variety of cage objects. Ninety minutes after treadmill exercise stress at 25 m/min, 4 degrees slope, for 30 min (or no exercise stress) mice were sacrificed, and splenocyte blastogenesis to the T-cell mitogen concanavalin A (Con A), splenic T-cell subset enumeration, and percent live/dead splenic cells by flow cytometry were evaluated. Results showed significant interaction effects for mitogen responses, percent Ly2+ subset, and percent live/dead splenocyte responses. Proliferation to Con A was higher in nonenrich group-housed animals than other groups. Percent live/dead cell analysis revealed a significant housing x stress interaction with fewer percent live and higher percent metabolically stressed splenocytes obtained from ind-stressed mice than other groups. These data suggest that enrichment and housing density are important factors influencing immune responses in the basal state, and in response to exercise stress.