Research on the impact of diet and memory has garnered considerable attention while exploring the link between obesity and cognitive impairment. High-fat diet (HFD) rodent models recapitulate the obesity phenotype and subsequent cognitive impairments. While it is known that HFD is associated with sensory impairment, little attention has been given to the potential role these sensory deficits may play in recognition memory testing, one of the most commonly used cognitive tests. Because mice utilize their facial whiskers as their primary sensory apparatus, we modified a common recognition test, the novel object recognition task, by replacing objects with sandpaper grits at ground level, herein referred to as the novel tactile recognition task (NTR). First, we tested whisker-manipulated mice in this task to determine its reliance on intact whiskers. Then, we tested the HFD mouse in the NTR. Finally, to ensure that deficits in the NTR are due to cognitive impairment and not HFD-induced sensory deficiencies, we tested the whisker sensitivity of HFD mice via the corner test. Our results indicate that the NTR is a whisker dependent task, and that HFD mice exhibit tactile recognition memory impairment, not accompanied by whisker sensory deficits.

中文翻译：

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高脂肪饮食会损害小鼠的触觉辨别记忆。


在探索肥胖与认知障碍之间的联系时，关于饮食和记忆影响的研究引起了相当多的关注。高脂肪饮食（HFD）啮齿动物模型重现了肥胖表型和随后的认知障碍。虽然众所周知，HFD 与感觉障碍有关，但很少有人关注这些感觉缺陷在识别记忆测试（最常用的认知测试之一）中可能发挥的潜在作用。由于小鼠利用面部胡须作为主要感觉器官，因此我们修改了常见的识别测试，即新颖的物体识别任务，通过在地面上用砂纸砂替换物体，本文称为新颖的触觉识别任务（NTR）。首先，我们在这项任务中测试了胡须操纵的小鼠，以确定其对完整胡须的依赖。然后，我们在NTR中测试了HFD鼠标。最后，为了确保 NTR 的缺陷是由于认知障碍而不是 HFD 引起的感觉缺陷，我们通过角落测试测试了 HFD 小鼠的胡须敏感性。我们的结果表明，NTR 是一项依赖于胡须的任务，并且 HFD 小鼠表现出触觉识别记忆障碍，但不伴有胡须感觉缺陷。