A Standardized Anxiety Quotient in Elevated Open Platform Task Quantifies Rodent Anxiogenic Tendency with Improved Reliability and Sensitivity

• Published in: Neuroscience 2019-12, Vol.423, p.12-17
• Main Authors: Suo, William Z., Peng, David W., Singh, Prabhakar, Ding, Xue-Feng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: anxiety; behavioral test; binary; elevated open platform; elevated plus maze; reliability; rodent; sensitivity
• ISSN: 0306-4522; 1873-7544
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2019.10.030

•This report describes a revised version of elevated open platform (EOP) test with improved sensitivity and reliability.•This test virtually assigns increasing fearful challenges to the 7 centric rings of the platform from the center to edges.•Animal on this elevated open bright platform moves freely within its “comfortable zone”, marking its peak tolerance of fear.•This “peak” tolerance of fear (PTF) or its inversed version of anxiety quotient (AQ) correlates with anxiogenic tendency.•Replacing traditional parameters with PEAK filters out unrelated variations, making the test more sensitive and reliable. Sensitivity and reliability of animal behavioral assessment methods are critical for successful translation of in vitro findings to in vivo. Here we report a data transformation process in the elevated open platform task that generates a novel parameter, namely peak tolerance of fear (PTF) or its inversely correlated equivalent of anxiety quotient (AQ), to measure anxiogenic tendency in rodent. As compared to traditional parameters such as travel distance, time, or entries, PTF or AQ displays largely reduced data dispersion not only ingroup but also cross-study and cross-cohort, therefore representing a significant improvement of the methodology for rodent anxiety assessment.