Abstract
Early life adversity, such as postnatal maternal separation (MS), play a central role in the development of psychopathologies during individual ontogeny. In this study, we investigated the effects of repeated MS (4 h per day from postnatal day (PND) 1–21) on the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and the hippocampus of male and female juvenile (PND 21), adolescent (PND 35) and young adult (PND 56) Wistar rats. The results indicated that MS increased BDNF in the CA1 and the dentate gyrus (DG) of adolescent rats as well as in the DG of young adult rats. However, the expression of BDNF in the mPFC in the young adult rats was decreased by MS. Additionally, in the hippocampus, there was decreased BDNF expression with age in both the MS and non separated rats. However, in the mPFC, the BDNF expression was increased with age in the non separated rats; nevertheless, the BDNF expression was significantly decreased in the MS young adult rats. In the NAc, the BDNF expression was increased with age in the male non-maternal separation (NMS) rats, and the young adult female MS rats had less BDNF expression than the adolescent female MS rats. The present study shows unique age-differently changes on a molecular level induced by MS and advances the use of MS as a valid animal model to detect the underlying neurobiological mechanisms of mental disorders.
Highlights
Adverse early life events are considered to be risk factors for the development of psychiatric diseases (Walker and Diforio, 1997; Ellenbroek and Cools, 1998; Marais et al, 2008; Réus et al, 2011)
We aimed to investigate the effects of repeated maternal separation (MS) (4 h/day from postnatal day (PND) 1–21) on the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) expression levels in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), nucleus accumbens (NAc) and hippocampus in juvenile (PND 21), adolescent (PND 35) and young adult (PND 56) rats
The post hoc (LSD) comparisons revealed that in the non-maternal separation (NMS) group, the PND 35 and PND 56 rats had significantly less expression compared with the PND 21 rats; in the MS group, the PND 56 rats had significantly less expression compared with the PND 21 and PND 35 rats (Figure 1A)
Summary
Adverse early life events are considered to be risk factors for the development of psychiatric diseases (Walker and Diforio, 1997; Ellenbroek and Cools, 1998; Marais et al, 2008; Réus et al, 2011). MS increased the BDNF level in the hippocampus of adult rats (Greisen et al, 2005; Faure et al, 2007), reduced the BDNF levels in the PFC, hippocampus and striatum of mice (Ognibene et al, 2008) or had no change with respect to the BDNF levels in the PFC and hippocampus (Réus et al, 2011). These discrepancies may be resulted from the different experimental procedures, species and strains adopted in these studies
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