Early-life stress leads to sex-dependent changes in pubertal timing in rats that are reversed by a probiotic formulation

Puberty marks the beginning of a period of dramatic physical, hormonal, and social change. This instability has made adolescence infamous as a time of storm and stress and it is well-established that stress during adolescence can be particularly damaging. However, prior stress may also shape the adolescent experience. In the present series of experiments, we observed sex-specific effects of early-life maternal separation stress on the timing of puberty onset in the rat. Specifically, stressed females exhibited earlier pubertal onset compared to standard-reared females, whereas stressed males matured later than their standard-reared counterparts. Further, we demonstrated that a probiotic treatment restores the normative timing of puberty onset in rodents of both sexes. These results are in keeping with previous findings that probiotics reverse stress-induced changes in learned fear behaviors and stress hormone levels, highlighting the remarkable and wide-ranging restorative effects of probiotics in the context of early-life stress.