Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Stress appears to be an important factor affecting feeding and women are especially susceptible to emotional and stress-induced eating. Our goal was to characterize the precise patterns of sucrose licking and the response to stress of female rats in a model of sucrose binge eating induced by stress. On 30 adolescent female rats submitted to a weekly schedule combining food restriction (2 days/week), stress (1/week) and 2-h access to sucrose (3/week), we selected binge eating prone (BEP, n=12) and binge eating resistant (BER, n=11) based on the amount and consistency of sucrose intake after stress exposure. The BEP rats displayed stress-induced binge eating since they increased their sucrose intake after stress whereas the BER rats drank similar sucrose quantities across conditions. Rats ingesting fluids emit licks which tend to group in clusters and analysis of the cluster's characteristics can provide valuable information about the mechanisms underlying the intake. In our study, licking analysis showed that the BEP rats displayed more frequent, smaller and shorter clusters of licks during sucrose intake suggesting a compulsive-like behavior. The BEP rats also presented a decreased level of anxiety and a blunted response to stress. All together, these results suggest that a dysfunction of the brain regions involved in stress regulation may contribute to compulsive-like eating after stress.