“…Anxiety disorders are the largest group of mental disorders in the Western world (Craske et al , 2017), with a 20% lifetime occurrence (Meier & Deckert, 2019). The COVID pandemic has been accompanied by yet a greater number of anxiety cases (Walsh et al , 2021), highlighting the need to explore the origins of infection-induced anxiety and seek ways to treat these devastating disorders and the Long COVID symptoms (Sudre et al , 2021). Intriguingly, anxiety disorders have often been found to be positively linked to obesity and the metabolic syndrome (characterized by three of the following five symptoms - type II diabetes, hyperlipidemia, high LDL, low HDL and hypertension (Huang, 2009)); this is the case in humans (Van Reedt Dortland et al , 2013; Tang et al , 2017), rats (Dutheil et al , 2016), mice (Xia et al , 2021; Almeida-Suhett et al , 2017; Meydan et al , 2016) and adult zebrafish (Türkoğlu et al , 2022; Picolo et al , 2021).…”