Characteristics of age-related behavioral changes in senescence-accelerated mouse SAMP8 and SAMP10

Senescence-Accelerated Mouse (SAM), a murine model of accelerated senescence, has been established by Takeda et al. (1981). SAM consists of senescence-accelerated-prone mouse (SAMP) and senescence-accelerated-resistant mouse (SAMR), the latter of which shows normal aging characteristics. In 1991 there were eight different substrains in the P-series, which commonly exhibited accelerated aging with a shortened life span (Takeda et al., 1991). Among the P-series, we have found that SAMP8 mice show significant impairments in a variety of learning tasks when compared with SAMR1 mice (Miyamoto et al., 1986). Further studies suggest that SAMP8 exhibits an age-related emotional disorder characterized by reduced anxiety-like behavior (Miyamoto et al., 1992). On the other hand, it has been shown that SAMP10 exhibits brain atrophy and learning impairments in an avoidance task (Shimada et al., 1992, 1993). Here, characteristics of age-related deficits in learning and memory, changes in emotional behavior, and abnormality of circadian rhythms in SAMP8 and SAMP10 mice are described. In the experiments, SAMP8/Ta (SAMP8), SAMP10/(/)Ta (SAMP10) and SAMR1TA (SAMR1) reared under specific pathogen-free conditions at Takeda Chemical Industries were used.