Research Article Correlations between Hippocampal Neurogenesis and Metabolic Indices in Adult Nonhuman Primates

Copyright © 2011 Tarique D. Perera et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Increased neurogenesis in feeding centers of the murine hypothalamus is associated with weight loss in diet-induced obese rodents (Kokoeva et al., 2005 and Matrisciano et al., 2010), but this relationship has not been examined in other species. Postmortem hippocampal neurogenesis rates and premortem metabolic parameters were statistically analyzed in 8 chow-fed colony-reared adult bonnet macaques. Dentate gyrus neurogenesis, reflected by the immature neuronal marker, doublecortin (DCX), and ex-pression of the antiapoptotic gene factor, B-cell lymphoma 2 (BCL-2), but not the precursor proliferationmitotic marker, Ki67, was inversely correlated with body weight and crown-rump length. DCX and BCL-2 each correlated positively with blood glucose level and lipid ratio (total cholesterol/high-density lipoprotein). This study demonstrates that markers of dentate gyrus neuroplasticity correlate with metabolic parameters in primates. 1