Social Isolation Impacts Select Responses to Simulated Weightlessness

The rodent hindlimb unloading (HU) model was initially developed to simulate the cephalad fluid shift and musculoskeletal disuse in astronauts. Since then, the HU model has been applied to explore how other systems (e.g. immune, cardiovascular and CNS) respond to weightlessness. Most HU studies are performed with singly-housed animals, although social isolation also can substantially impact behavior and physiology, and therefore may confound HU experimental results. We hypothesized that relative to social housing, single housing exacerbates HU-induced dysfunction in select organ systems. We refined the standard NASA-Ames HU model to accommodate social housing in HU pairs, retaining advantageous features of traditional housing but using commercial off-the-shelf components to facilitate adoption by others. We conducted a 30 day HU experiment with adult, female C57Bl6/NJ mice that were either singly or socially housed. HU animals in both single and social HU housing displayed expected musculoskeletal deficits compared to housing matched, normally loaded (NL) controls. However, select immune, HPA axis, and CNS responses were differentially impacted by the HU social environment relative to NL controls. HU reduced % CD4+ T cells in singly-housed, but not socially-housed mice. Surprisingly, HU increased adrenal gland mass in socially-housed but not singly-housed mice, while social isolation increased adrenal gland mass in NL controls. HU also increased plasma corticosterone levels (day 30) in both singly and socially-housed mice. Thus, the social environment altered select adrenal and immune, but not musculoskeletal, responses to simulated weightlessness. We refine our original hypothesis since our results show combined stressors can mask, not only exacerbate, tissue responses to HU. These findings further expand the utility of the HU model for studying possible combined effects of the various spaceflight stressors.