Abstract
The multiple insecurities, anatomical, physiological and psychological changes arising from the gestational period can generate an overload of stress in the mother and cause disturbances in the offspring, affecting it throughout its development. The existing analysis linking prenatal stress and offspring’s anxiety have divergent results, being limited as to gestational week, type of stressor and age of progeny’s assessment. Social separation has been described as a stressor that causes increase in anxiety. Thus, the present study evaluated the effects of social separation applied in one of the three gestational weeks of rat dams on the manifestation of the defensive behaviors related to generalized anxiety disorder and panic in the Elevated T Maze of the male progeny in three stages of development (1, 3 or 6 months of life). It was found, in the offspring of grouped (control) dams, increased behaviors associated with generalized anxiety disorder and a reduction of panic-like behaviors throughout development. For animals whose dams were socially separated during pregnancy, the most critical period of exposure was the 2nd gestational week, which affected the acquisition of aversive memory, demonstrated by the impairment on learning of avoidances of the offspring in all ages evaluated. Stressor exposure in this week also increased the avoidances, related to generalized anxiety of progeny in the 1st month and decreased escapes, related to panic in the 3rd month of life and, at the age of 6 months old, an inverse situation, with the reduction of the defensive behaviors associated to generalized anxiety disorder. The results show that, when assessing effects of prenatal stress on the manifestation of anxiety, not only the period of exposure is important, but also the age of offspring assessed.
Highlights
It has become increasingly clear that the interaction between genes and environment determines the functional development of an organism
Observing only control groups it was possible to verify changes in manifestation of the defensive behaviors related to anxiety along the development of rats whose dams were kept in groups during the gestational period
About the effect of prenatal stressors on the manifestation of progeny’s anxiety, the results showed that social separation during 2nd week of gestation caused increase in latency of avoidance for 1 month old animals, predisposing them to the manifestation of generalized anxiety disorder
Summary
It has become increasingly clear that the interaction between genes and environment determines the functional development of an organism. It is known that the stress suffered by the embryo or fetus during gestation, i.e., prenatal stress, can cause pathologies [1]. The mechanisms by which prenatal stress affects the progeny have not been fully established yet, studies indicate its relationship with the action of catecholamines released due to autonomic activation, decreasing oxygenation and the supply of basic nutrients to the fetus [3, 4], as well as the exposure of the embryo or fetus to glucocorticoids [1, 5], which culminates in the modification of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis’ reactivity in the offspring [6,7,8,9]. Evidences indicate that prenatal stress can alter other neuroendocrine circuitry, such as serotonergic [10,11,12,13], noradrenergic [7], GABAergic [14, 15], glutamatergic [15, 16], and of oxytocin and vasopressin [17], indicating direct changes of these systems or indirectly, modulated by the alterations in HPA axis of progeny, via prenatal stress
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