Ace Therapeutics, as a drug discovery and development partner, can provide our global customers with flexible and customized anxiety animal model services to help researchers successfully achieve their research goals.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is the most common of all anxiety disorders, and SAD has serious consequences and is a disabling disorder that can render individuals unable to perform everyday tasks. Social fear and avoidance of social situations are the main behavioral symptoms of SAD, a disorder that has not been fully elucidated and for which treatment options are rather unsatisfactory. Therefore, animal models are needed to study the potential etiology of the disorder and possible new treatments.
Fig. 1 Schematic representation of the social fear conditioning paradigm. (Toth I, et al., 2013)
Ace Therapeutics has established a variety of animal models of social anxiety disorder that exhibit social avoidance and fear in rodents. Our approach to modeling SAD includes foot shock exposure, restraint stress, social isolation, social instability, social failure, social failure/overcrowding, and chronic subordinate colony housing. In addition, we offer behavioral paradigms for assessing social avoidance and fear in rodents, including the social interaction test, the social preference-avoidance test, the social approach-avoidance test, the three-chambered social approach test, the partition test, and the modified Y-maze test.
Information on animal models of SAD we provide:
Stress paradigm | Methods | Depressive-like behavior |
---|---|---|
Social isolation | Individual feeding of rodents during development from weaning to adulthood | Increased general anxiety in Elevated Plus Maze Test (EPM) and open field testing |
Social instability | Exposure of rats or mice to alternate housing conditions for several weeks, such as social isolation, overcrowding, and changes in cage mates, each lasting 1-24 hours | Increased general anxiety in EPM and open field testing |
Social defeat | A smaller lab rat or mouse (the intruder) is placed in the home cage of a larger and aggressive specific criminal (the inhabitant) who defends his territory and defeats the intruder. | Increased generalized anxiety in EPM, open field test, forced swim test, and sucrose preference test |
Social defeat/overcrowding | Expose male mice to unpredictable social failure (using different dominant males, once or twice a day for 2 hr, alternating days for 14 days) and overcrowding (24 hr groups of 16 specific individuals each, alternating days for 5 days) for 19 consecutive days. | Increased general anxiety in social preference avoidance tests |
Chronic subordinate colony housing | Four experimental mice or rats were housed for 19 consecutive days in the homes of the more dominant males. | Increased general anxiety in social preference avoidance tests |
Foot shock exposure | Unavoidable foot electroshock administered to rats or mice once or several times daily and at short exposure intervals. | Increased general anxiety in EPM and light-dark box testing |
Restraint stress | Rodents were enclosed in narrowly perforated Plexiglas tubes or cages to restrict their movement for 15 minutes to 6 hours. | Increased general anxiety in EPM and field trials |
Note: Our service list is constantly updated and improved. Please contact us via email for more latest information and related information.
Ace Therapeutics not only offers animal models of SAD, but also test analyses to measure anxiety-related behaviors in these animals. If you are interested in our animal models of neuropsychiatric disorders, please feel free to
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