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Hyperglycemia is defined as excessive blood glucose levels. Although it could reflect a situation of acute stress, hyperglycemia is also a condition that often leads to a diagnosis of diabetes, a chronic disorder of insulin secretion and/or resistance. In 2016, the number of adults living with diabetes has reached 422 million worldwide, and each year, 1.5 million people die from this disease, making it a major health problem1. Indeed, uncontrolled diabetes leads to several physiological disorders affecting the cardiovascular system, kidneys, and the peripheral and central nervous systems.
Interestingly, acute and chronic hyperglycemia may alter cognition and contribute to both dementia and depression2,3,4,5,6. In addition, the admission of patients with hyperglycemia has been associated with worse functional, neurological, and survival outcomes after ischemic stroke7,8,9,10,11. It was also shown that hyperglycemia/diabetes affect adult neurogenesis, a process leading to the generation of new neurons, by impacting neural stem cell activity and neuronal differentiation, migration, and survival2,12.
In contrast to mammals, teleost fish, like zebrafish, display intense neurogenic activity throughout the whole brain and exhibit an outstanding capacity for brain repair during adulthood13,14,15,16. Notably, such capacities are possible due to the persistence of neural stem/progenitor cells, including radial glia and neuroblasts17,18,19. In addition, the zebrafish has recently emerged as a model for studying metabolic disorders, including obesity and hyperglycemia/diabetes20,21,22.
Although the zebrafish is a well-recognized model of hyperglycemia and neurogenesis, few studies have investigated the impact of hyperglycemia on brain homeostasis and cognitive function12,23. To determine the impact of hyperglycemia on constitutive and injury-induced brain cell proliferation, a model of acute hyperglycemia was created through the intraperitoneal injection of D-glucose. In addition, a model of chronic hyperglycemia was reproduced through the immersion of fish in water supplemented with D-glucose12. Zebrafish exhibit many advantages in research. They are cheap, easy to raise, and transparent during the first stages of development, and their genome has been sequenced. In the context of this work, they also display several additional advantages: (1) they share similar physiological processes with humans, making them a critical tool for biomedical research; (2) they allow for the quick investigation of the impact of hyperglycemia on brain homeostasis and neurogenesis, given their widespread and strong neurogenic activity; and (3) they are an alternative model, allowing for the reduction of the number of mammals used in research. Finally, zebrafish can be used as a model for testing the biodistribution of radiolabeled molecules and potential therapeutic agents using PET/CT.
The overall goal of the following procedure is to visually document how to set up models of acute and chronic hyperglycemia in zebrafish, use zebrafish to assess brain remodeling in hyperglycemic conditions, and monitor radiolabeled molecules (here, [18F]-FDG) using PET/CT.