Journal
HORMONES AND BEHAVIOR
Volume 63, Issue 3, Pages 411-417Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2012.11.010
Keywords
Maternal separation; Early handling; Maternal care; Postnatal development; c57bl/6 mouse; Corticosterone; Early life stress; Anxiety; HPA axis
Categories
Funding
- Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium
- Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Fund L.L.C.
- NARSAD Young Investigator Grant [N008728]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Adverse early life experience, such as childhood abuse, neglect, and trauma, increases lifetime risk for mental illness. To investigate underlying mechanisms, the maternal separation (MS) paradigm was developed and validated as an animal model of early adversity in rats, reliably effecting long-term changes to anxiety, gene expression, and stress response. However, across-species validation of core findings in mice has met with limited success. To re-visit parameters governing the effectiveness of MS in mice, this study investigated the effect of MS on maternal care, offspring behavior, and offspring stress-induced corticosterone response in the c57bl/6 mouse strain. The results from this study suggest that: (i) levels of maternal care increase as a function of separation duration immediately after daily MS, but long-term care remains unchanged; and (ii) c57bl/6 mice are resilient to MS, exhibiting subtle decreases in anxiety and unchanged stress-induced corticosterone response as adults, irrespective of separation duration. (c) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available