Abstract
Environmental enrichment (EE) is an experimental paradigm that is used to explore how a complex, stimulating environment can impact overall health. In laboratory animal experiments, EE housing conditions typically include larger-than-standard cages, abundant bedding, running wheels, mazes, toys, and shelters which are rearranged regularly to further increase stimulation. EE has been shown to improve multiple aspects of health, including but not limited to metabolism, learning and cognition, anxiety and depression, and immunocompetence. Recent advances in lifespan have led some researchers to consider aging as a risk factor for disease. As such, there is a pressing need to understand the processes by which healthspan can be increased. The natural and predictable changes during aging can be reversed or decreased through EE and its underlying mechanisms. Here, we review the use of EE in laboratory animals to understand mechanisms involved in aging, and comment on relative areas of strength and weakness in the current literature. We additionally address current efforts toward applying EE-like lifestyle interventions to human health to extend healthspan. Although increasing lifespan is a clear goal of medical research, improving the quality of this added time also deserves significant attention. Despite hurdles in translating experimental results toward clinical application, we argue there is great potential in using features of EE toward improving human healthy life expectancy or healthspan, especially in the context of increased global longevity.
Highlights
Environmental EnrichmentEnvironmental enrichment (EE) is a laboratory animal housing model that combines complex physical, social, cognitive, motor, and somatosensory stimuli to elicit improvements in systemic metabolism, immunity, and behavior (Nithianantharajah and Hannan, 2006)
An increase in leptin and a decrease in adiponectin occurs (Palmer and Kirkland, 2016). As this might suggest, increased levels of adiponectin have been positively correlated to longevity and good metabolic health (Atzmon et al, 2008; Palmer and Kirkland, 2016) whereas the development of central and peripheral leptin resistance in aged models contributes to obesity and other metabolic dysfunction resulting in numerous further comorbidities (Scarpace et al, 2000, 2001)
We have presented EE (Figure 1) as an apt model for studying healthspan and have speculated on how we might begin to translate findings to the clinic in search of extended healthspan
Summary
Environmental enrichment (EE) is a laboratory animal housing model that combines complex physical, social, cognitive, motor, and somatosensory stimuli to elicit improvements in systemic metabolism, immunity, and behavior (Nithianantharajah and Hannan, 2006). This review will serve to discuss the work of our lab and others to highlight how EE can be a powerful tool to elucidate novel systemic and local mechanisms underlying age-related bodily change, disease, and health (Figure 1) While this is not the first review to summarize the benefits of enrichment across the lifespan – and is certainly not the first to mention gene-environment interactions on neurodegenerative disease (Nithianantharajah and Hannan, 2006; Laviola et al, 2008; Pang and Hannan, 2013; Mo et al, 2015; Shepherd et al, 2018), cognitive disorders (Ohline and Abraham, 2019; Rogers et al, 2019), and psychiatric disorders (Nithianantharajah and Hannan, 2006; Burrows et al, 2011; Rogers et al, 2019) – this review newly broaches the healthspan issue, highlights EE-healthspan work, and investigates the “translatability problem” of such research. We hope both clinicians and researchers can better develop and implement therapeutic applications in the pursuit of increasing human healthspan
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