Selecting an appropriate stress model of depression in rodents

Table 1 Advantages and disadvantages of common depression model animal strains

Strains	Advantages	Disadvantages
C57BL/6	Maintain a state of chronic psychological stress	Little spontaneous activity
	More likely to exhibit depressive states	Poor ability to explore novel environments
	Little individual variation and high stability
BALB/c	Lower social performance	Poor motherhood, low litter size, and high mortality of litters
	Better replicates some models of psychosomatic illness in humans	Relatively low aggressiveness
	Besides showing emotional stress changes, it also shows qi deficiency-like symptoms, which is suitable for building a combined Chinese medicine disease and evidence model
Kunming breed	Only one experiment is needed to achieve the observation effect and the experiment cost is low	High variation in growth and reproduction in the presence of inconsistent genetic backgrounds
	Can be used for experiments on mental differences between genders
	Good reproducibility of experiments
Wistar Kyoto	Susceptibility to learned helplessness	High reactivity to stress is more likely to lead to anxiety-based mental illness
	Long duration of resting despair in the forced swim experiment
	Short activity distances also appear in the open field experiment
Sprague Dawley	Significant impairment of non-spatial learning memory capacity	No obvious disadvantages
	A marked depression-like profile is accompanied by a less pronounced anxiety-like presentation
Flinder Resistant Line	Very sensitive to a wide range of drugs with different pharmacological mechanisms	Antidepressant-like behaviour can occur with long-term medication
Wistar	This is an important guideline for the study of the “qi stagnation and blood stasis” model in Chinese medicine	Habitat reproduction patterns are easily influenced by the external environment