The Effect of Early Life Environmental Enrichment on Cognitive Performance in the Triple Transgenic Alzheimer's Disease Mouse Modal

Abstract

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is associated with several cognitive deficits, in which cognitive reserve (CR) hypothesis posits that individuals who have an enriched lifestyle will be less susceptible to cognitive decline associated with aging and dementia. CR can be modeled with a standard Environmental enrichment (EE) protocol using rodents. Unfortunately, this EE procedure has a limit on quantifying the enrichment each mouse obtains from being in an enriched cage. Thus, we developed a novel EE procedure to overcome these limits. The current study used male wildtype and triple transgenic AD (3xTg-AD) mice to evaluate the potential for modeling CR using this novel procedure. After EE, we longitudinally evaluated mice on tasks assessing multisensory integration (MSI) abilities. Our early results suggest that enrichment track training early in life may confer cognitive benefits related to multisensory integration and that this effect can reverse deficits on the MSI tasks that relate to AD-like pathology.