Neonatal Anoxia Impacts Rats’ Maternal Behavior and Offspring Development due to Ultrasonic Vocalization’s Impairment

Abstract

Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy is a severe clinical condition, among others, affecting the brain after offspring exposure to neonatal anoxia, which causes persistent sensorimotor and cognitive deficits. During peripartum, maternal behaviors are crucial for the healthy development of the offspring. In rats, the vocalization of newborns, around 40 kHz, corresponds to separation calls that encourage their mothers to retrieve them. Alterations in this pattern affect the maternal behavior addressed to the offspring. This study aimed to evaluate the maternal behavior of primiparous rats whose offspring were exposed to neonatal anoxia in P2 (postpartum day) during the lactation period, to assess mother-pup interactions through the pups’ vocalization from P3 to P18. It also intends to quantify eventual neuronal alterations in the mothers’ medial preoptic area after the last weaning (P21) through FOS protein expression. Anoxia offspring were found to reduce maternal behaviors toward them, increased frequency of separation calls in the male anoxia group, and reduced vocalization rate in the female anoxia group compared to their respective controls. Body weight gain reduction of males’ and females’ anoxia was observed. We concluded that anoxia exerts deleterious effects on the vocalization patterns of the pups, with sex differences that alter maternal behavior toward them. Impaired USV makes an additional negative impact on the already noxious effects of neonatal anoxia. Understanding those phenomena applies/contributes to guiding procedures and strategies to mitigate the deleterious outcomes and orient research concerning the complexity of neonatal anoxia events and the influence of maternal care quality concerning the pups, which should also be considered sex differences.