Nutritional supplements formulated to prevent cognitive impairment in animals

Abstract

Heat stress will cause a series of response in the living system and the most significant impact is on brain functions. The aim of this article is to develop nutritional supplements that can alleviate cognitive decline caused by heat stress. In this article, we screen functional food factors which can prevent or relieve effects on heat stress injury based on bioinformatics. 129 function factors related to the crossover targets were obtained, and a food database related to the prevention of high-temperature impairment was constructed. After a series of scoring standards combined with food classification, two formulas—nutrition fortifier formula (tyrosine and multivitamin B) and plant compound formula (quercetin, proanthocyanidin, and naringin) were investigated using animal experiments to determine their ability to prevent cognitive impairment of heat-stressed animals. Our results demonstrated that certain functional food factors and our two designed formulations significantly prevent cognitive impairment of heat-stressed animals.Further mechanism was carried out by cell viability assay, reactive oxygen species assay, real-time quantitative PCR and Western blot. The results showed that the plant compound formula diluted 4000 times had the best relieving effect on HT22 after heat stress, and this concentration formula can significantly alleviate the elevated levels of reactive oxygen species caused by heat stress. This formula also can significantly down-regulate IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, IL-10, iNOS and COX-2 expression. Likewise, Western blot results showed that the formula could activate the cAMP pathway and increase the expression of phosphorylated PKA and BDNF in hippocampal cells.