Twice daily long maternal separations in Wistar rats decreases anxiety-like behaviour in females but does not affect males

Abstract

Prolonged daily separations of rat pups from their mother have been reported to increase anxiety-like behaviour in adult offspring. However, there are an increasing number of studies not showing this. It has been proposed that the effect of long maternal separation (LMS) is partly due to the disruption of maternal care caused by the separations. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether increasing the number of daily separations would produce more robust effects in the adult offspring on anxiety-like behaviour in the defensive withdrawal test, and on spontaneous motor activity. Since previous studies of LMS have revealed sex differences in behaviour, we included both males and females. In our separation paradigm we subjected rat pups to either two daily 3 h maternal separations during the first 2 weeks postpartum (LMS), two daily 15 min maternal separations (brief maternal separations, BMS) during the same time period to control for the effects of handling, or to normal husbandry conditions. As adults we found no effects of this LMS paradigm in male rats, although BMS males showed a tendency toward decreased anxiety-like behaviour. In contrast, LMS females showed a decrease in anxiety-like behaviour. We also found significant sex differences that were most prominent in the LMS group, indicating that females are more sensitive to our maternal separation paradigm. The present study suggests that increasing the number of maternal separations does not increase anxiety-like behaviour in neither male nor female Wistar rats.