Cited by 109Stress Responses and CortisolMemory and Neural MechanismsChild Abuse and Trauma

Effects of early-life stress on cognitive function and hippocampal structure in female rodents.

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Loi, M., Mossink, J.C.L., Meerhoff, G.F., Den Blaauwen, J.L., Lucassen, P.J., Joëls, M.·2017·Neuroscience

Abstract

We tested the effect of early-life stress (ELS) - 24h maternal deprivation (MD) at postnatal day (PND) 3 - on cognitive performance and hippocampal structure in 12-17-week-old female rats. Behavioral performance was examined in: the Elevated Plus Maze, as an index for general anxiety; the rodent Iowa gambling test, probing reward-based decision making; and the object recognition and object-in-location task, to assess non-stressful contextual memory performance. We further determined hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG) volume and cell density as well as adult proliferation and neurogenesis rates. Half of the rats was treated with the glucocorticoid receptor antagonist mifepristone during a critical pre-pubertal developmental window (PNDs 26-28), in an attempt to ameliorate the potentially adverse behavioral consequences of ELS. Neither MD nor treatment with the glucocorticoid antagonist affected behavioral performance of the females in any of the tasks. Also, DG structure, proliferation and neurogenesis were not different between the groups. Lack of structural differences and a behavioral phenotype in non-stressful hippocampus dependent learning tasks fits with the lack of phenotype generally reported after ELS in female but less so in male rodents. As evident from an extensive literature review, female and male animals appear to respond more similarly to early-life adversity when tested in anxiety-related tasks. This agrees with recent findings in humans suggesting that females may be relatively resilient to the structural/hippocampal effects of childhood maltreatment, but not to the anxiety and mood-related psychopathology for which childhood maltreatment is considered a risk factor.

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  • Males are more affected than females in a broad range of behavioral domains following early postnatal manipulations of maternal care in rodents.

    “Focusing on early postnatal manipulations of maternal care in rodents as a model for ELS, it seems that males are more affected than females in a broad range of behavioral domains (Loi et al., 2017; Schroeder et al., 2018).”

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Authors
Loi, M., Mossink, J. C. L., Meerhoff, G. F., Den Blaauwen, J. L., Lucassen, P. J., & Joëls, M.
Affiliations
  • University Medical Center Utrecht (NL)
  • University of Amsterdam (NL)
Venue
Neuroscience
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2017-02
Volume
342
Pages
101-119
ISSN
0306-4522 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W1631193623
Cited by
109
References
121
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 23 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 6
FWCI
4.63
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • Utrecht University Repository (Utrecht University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • Utrecht University Repository (Utrecht University) (submittedVersion)
  • Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
Funders
  • Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science
  • NWO (024.001.003)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Behavioral Neuroscience › Stress Responses and Cortisol
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child Abuse and Trauma
Keywords
early life stress, maternal deprivation, hippocampus, dentate gyrus, hippocampal neurogenesis, adult neurogenesis, mifepristone, glucocorticoid receptor, sex differences, anxiety, contextual memory, reward-based decision-making, child abuse, female rats
MeSH terms
Animals, Animals, Newborn, Anxiety, Cognition, Disease Models, Animal, Female, Gambling, Hippocampus, Hormone Antagonists, Maternal Deprivation, Memory, Neurons, Random Allocation, Receptors, Glucocorticoid, Sexual Maturation, Stress, Psychological, Mifepristone, Rats, Wistar, Treatment Failure, Neurogenesis

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