Abstract
Mental stress is a risk factor not only for mental illness but also for various diseases. Chronic social defeat stress (CSDS) is widely used to develop animal models of depression, which is based on the resident intruder paradigm or inter-male aggression. This review introduces the features of the experimental methods of CSDS and subchronic and mild social defeat stress (sCSDS) and phenotypes of CSDS mice. Our results of omics analyses of cecal metabolites, cecal and fecal microbiota, and ileal gene expression are described with respect to the effects of sCSDS on the murine intestinal ecosystem. Recent approaches to the investigation of food components that alleviate behavioral deficits and physical modulation of CSDS mice are also introduced.
