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Stress Using Rats

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Introduction This focus of this study is to determine the relationship between daily exercise and stress using rats as a model. It is hypothesized that increased daily exercise will reduce stress and stress hormones found in the blood of rats. This subject is of interest as it may be able to help both humans and future research using rats. If the findings of this experiment are translatable to humans, with further research improvements could be made to many aspects of our society. This could include better medical treatment, workplace productivity, or even academic performance by reducing or limiting stress. The results of is study may also help future researchers working with rat models that require the rats to be at a certain stress level; …show more content…

Rats chosen will all be of the same age, breed, and sex; they will also hopefully have been raised in similar environments to avoid any developmental differences that may act as confounds. A computer program will be used to randomly assign each rat to a specific level of daily exercise. They will then be monitored and taken care of by an experimenter who will subject the rats to their daily exercise. Another experimenter who is unaware of the amount of exercise each rat has endured will be responsible for observing them in the stress tests as well as measuring their levels of stress hormones. This will help avoid any biases that may occur if the experimenter was aware of what condition the rats were tested …show more content…

At the beginning of the experiment, all rats will be restricted to a condition of no exercise for 4 days, where their baseline reactions and levels of stress hormones will be recorded. After that initial period, rats will be subject to their specific levels of daily exercise and the results of tests performed will be compared to the baseline that was recorded previously for that specific rat. This will help account for individual differences in each rat, as some may have naturally higher or lower levels of stress. A select group of rats will also continue to have no exercise, just like at the start of the experiment. This will help give an idea as to what level of change observed is just caused by time spent in the lab and the controlled environmental conditions that all rats will be subject to. All rats, regardless of their experimental condition will individually be housed in the same type of cage, and receive the same type and amount of food and water. Again, this is to help control for any confounding variables that may affect the stress levels of the

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