Effect of hypoxia in early perinatal ontogenesis on behavior and structural characteristics of the rat brain

Abstract

The study has shown the acute hypoxia in newborn rat pups to lead to disturbances of processes of formation of brain structures, behavior reactions, and learning in the subsequent ontogenesis. The single normobaric hypoxia at the 2nd day of life causes retardation of such integrative parameter or genera development and growth as body mass at the period of feeding. In such animals, essential disturbances of the sensorimotor development were revealed in forms of delay of reflex reactions of turning on a plane, negative geotaxis, and avoidance of edge. Also detected was action of hypoxia on hanging on a rope by using front legs (a symptom of muscle weakness). Morphological study has shown stereotypic reaction to the early postnatal action of hypoxia in all studies of all studied functional zones of neocortex - motor, sensomotor, auditory, visual. The death of nerve cells is predominant in the II-III associative layers, the sizes and number of pyramidal neurons are sharply decreased. Different hippocampus fields maturing in mammals show a characteristic response to hypoxia. In individual hippocampus fields there was detected different degree of death of neurons, predominant in the CA3 and CA4 fields. A possibility of modeling of perinatal encephalopathy with minimal brain dysfunctions in children is discussed.