Microstructural and metabolic recovery of anhedonic rat brains: An in vivo diffusion MRI and ¹H-MRS approach

This article presents longitudinal ¹H-MR Spectroscopy (¹H-MRS) data from ventral hippocampus and in vivo diffusion MRI (dMRI) data of the brain from control and anhedonic rats. The¹H-MRS and dMRI data were acquired using a 9.4 T preclinical imaging system. Before MRI experiments, animals were exposed to unpredictable chronic mild stress exposure for eight weeks and on the basis of a sucrose consumption test were identified as anhedonic and resilient. An age-matched group of animals, unexposed to the unpredictable chronic mild stress paradigm was considered as control. Data was acquired at the age of 18, 20 and 25 weeks in the anhedonic group and at the age of 18 and 22 weeks in the control group. This multimodal MRI data provides metabolic information of ventral hippocampus and dMRI based microstructural parameters of the brain.