maternal separation

Brain and behavioural impacts of early life adversity

Abuse, neglect, and other forms of uncontrollable stress during childhood and early adolescence can lead to adverse outcomes later in life, including especially perturbations in the regulation of mood and emotional states, and specifically anxiety disorders and depression. However, stress experiences vary from one individual to the next, meaning that causal relationships and mechanistic accounts are often difficult to establish in humans. This interdisciplinary talk considers the value of research in experimental animals where stressor experiences can be tightly controlled and detailed investigations of molecular, cellular, and circuit-level mechanisms can be carried out. The talk will focus on the widely used repeated maternal separation procedure in rats where rat offspring are repeatedly separated from maternal care during early postnatal life. This early life stress has remarkably persistent effects on behaviour with a general recognition that maternally-deprived animals are susceptible to depressive-like phenotypes. The validity of this conclusion will be critically appraised with convergent insights from a recent longitudinal study in maternally separated rats involving translational brain imaging, transcriptomics, and behavioural assessment.

The deficits of recognition and memory in adolescence by neonatal maternal separation

Early exposure to Western-type diet and stress by maternal separation program brain metabolic capacity and cognition in adult rats

Long-term Effects of Maternal Separation on alcohol intake and acute stress response in male and female mice

Microglia ontogeny and early-life stress: microglial and behavioral sex-specific responses in prepubescent mice to maternal separation during infancy

Preclinical mouse study on maternal separation impacting childhood chemotherapy-induced cognitive impairment

Effect of repeated early maternal separation on anxiety in rats during the juvenile transition period

FENS Forum 2024

Hippocampal neurogenesis changes in a sex and region-specific manner in adult mice subjected to maternal separation as an early life stress

FENS Forum 2024

Maternal separation modifies the stress sensitivity, electrophysiology, and morphology of rat nucleus incertus neurons

FENS Forum 2024