Detailed analysis of the behavior and memory performance of middle-aged male and female CD-1 mice in a 3D maze

Fifty percent of CD-1 mice from both sex die by the end of 2 years. The survival rate is higher in females than in males. This high mortality rate is associated to the high susceptibility of this strain of mice to some immuno-pathologies and the high incidence of systemic amyloidosis. It is therefore possible that premature cognitive deficits can be observed in CD-1 mice. In the present study, we describe a novel method for assessing emotional responses and memory performance of young (4 months) and middle-aged (12 months) CD-1 mice of both sexes in a 3D spatial navigation task. Animals are introduced to the maze without preliminary habituation and trained in a working memory test. As expected CD-1 mice have a low number of entries to arms on their first exposure to the maze which confirm our previous report on the anxious trait of this strain compared to C57/BL6 mice. The measure of arm/bridge ratio suggests that anxiety induced by exposure to the maze persists much longer in middle-aged male mice compared to middle-aged female mice and compared to both young male and female mice. The measure of memory revealed that young female mice made significantly less arm repeats and more unique arm visits before first arm repeat than middle-aged female and male mice. There are also significant differences between young female and young male mice with the former committing fewer errors than the latter.