Sex Hormone and Sex Hormone Receptors Modulation of Exercise-induced Neurogenesis

Adult hippocampal neurogenesis (AHN) has been widely studied in many aspects. AHN is showed to have causal relationship with depression and anxiety. Experimental data showed that sex hormones and sex hormone receptors can be a factor that modulates AHN. However, few studies have focused on sex hormones’ effect on exercise-induced neurogenesis, which the detailed mechanism is unknown to people. In this paper, we designed the experiments to find a casual relationship between sex hormones (receptors) and exercise-induced neurogenesis. We utilized castration (TX) and ovariectomy (OVX) to control the hormone level within the rats’ body. Noteworthy, we also tested how can the numerical ratios of androgen to estrogen and androgen receptors to estrogen receptors affect exercise-induced neurogenesis by using conditional gene knockout and Cre recombinase. If the results turn out to be consistent with the hypothesis that the level of sex hormones and sex hormone receptors have influences on exercise-induced neurogenesis and depression-like behavior, we can put forward a treatment on anxiety disorders concerning the combination of exercise and sex hormone regulation.