Abstract

RAMIREZ YANEZ, Yeni; ZEPEDA RUIZ, Wendy Andrea  and  VELAZQUEZ MARTINEZ, David N.. Temporal Persistency of Binge Eating Behavior in Rats. Acta de investigación psicol [online]. 2018, vol.8, n.3, pp.17-24. ISSN 2007-4719.  https://doi.org/10.22201/fpsi.20074719e.2018.3.02.

Binge eating behavior has been defined as an increased intake of palatable food during a short time period. The experimental models with rodents that had studied this eating behavior had implicitly or explicitly assumed that the induction protocol produced a permanent change in palatable eating, although there is no description of the persistence of the behavioral pattern despite this pice of information may be needed to evaluate any therapeutic strategy. Therefore, present objectives were: a) determine whether binge eating behavior persist after its induction with a 2h access to sucrose solution concurrent to free access to rat chow food for 24 h and, b) determine whether the deprivation level of chow food modulates maintenance of binge eating behavior. To this aim, rats had a 2h daily access to 10% sucrose with concurrent access to ad lib food and water. It was observed that after 25 days subjects develop binge eating behavior. It was also observed that along 8 weeks at least, binge eating behavior was stable and neither ad lib access or food deprivation modulated binge eating behavior, that remained similar to the last induction day. Stability of binge eating behavior reproduced observations with human patients and may aloud the study of long term neural changes induced after binge induction.

Keywords : Food intake; Binge eating behavior; Stability of binge behavior; Incentive motivation.