Food‐Restriction Lowers the Acoustic Startle Response in both Male and Female Rats, and, in Combination with Acute Ghrelin Injection, Abolishes the Expression of Fear‐Potentiated Startle in Male Rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Food restriction has been reported to reduce anxiety-like behaviour in male rats, whereas the effects of food restriction on anxiety in female rats are less clear. Ghrelin is a peptide hormone produced and secreted in the stomach that stimulates food intake and is considered to play a role in reward and emotional responses such as fear expression. Under food restriction, endogenous ghrelin levels increase. In the present study, we examined the effect of moderate food restriction (80% of ad libitum fed weight), with or without an acute application of a small dose of exogenous ghrelin intended to cause an immediate hunger response, on the expression of the acoustic startle reflex (ASR). This was carried out under basal conditions (baseline ASR to 90- and 95-dB noise bursts), and in the presence of a light cue associated with a mild foot-shock, as measured by fear-potentiated startle, which compares the proportional change in ASR in the presence of the conditioned stimulus. The results obtained show that food-restriction reduces basal ASR in both male and female rats, apart from any concomitant change in motor activity, suggesting that food-restriction reduces anxiety levels in both sexes. In addition, the data show that food-restriction reduces fear-potentiated startle in male but not female rats. Acute ghrelin injection, prior to fear-potentiated startle testing, eliminates the expression of fear-potentiated startle in food-restricted male rats alone, suggesting a role for ghrelin in the reduction of fear expression in food-restricted male rats. These data imply that, although food-restriction decreases anxiety in both sexes, learned fear responses remain intact after food-restriction in female but not male rats.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".