Efeitos da suplementação com Geleia Real sobre comportamentos relacionados à depressão em camundongos expostos à estresse crônico

Abstract

Stress is a reaction of the body that impairs homeostasis and can cause physiological, motor and behavioral changes. During stress occurs activation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and the autonomic nervous system. Although metabolic adaptations that occur in response to stress are essential to the organism's survival, under chronic stress conditions they can be deleterious from, for example, the generation of free radicals. Brain cells are considered the most vulnerable to oxidative stress, which leads to the development or worsening of various pathologies, including depression and neurodegenerative diseases. Since treatments for depression and other psychiatric disorders with conventional drugs may have side effects that are detrimental to the patient, it is important to seek natural alternative treatments. Because of this, this study suggests a treatment for depression based on royal jelly, since it has several biological activities, among them antioxidant action, important against damage to the neural system. For this we used 39 adult male Balb / c mice divided into 4 groups. Of these groups, 2 were supplemented by gavage with Royal Jelly and 2 groups with water, once a day for 21 days. Two groups (GR / E and H20 / E) were induced to chronic stress by movement restriction daily for 2 hours, while the other groups were not exposed to stress (H2O / SE and GR / SE). At the end of treatment all animals were submitted to Forced Swimming test. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the groups, inferring that Royal Jelly was able to reverse the damage caused by chronic stress.