Differential gender-related susceptibility to learning and memory deficits in mice submitted to neonatal freezing...

Sexual dimorphism during mammalian neural development seems to contribute to differential gender-related incidence in malformations of cortical development in both humans and rodents. Here we investigated the existence of differential gender-related susceptibility to learning and memory deficits and brain injury severity in mice submitted to a microgyria model. Newborn male and female C57BL/6 mice (P0) were submitted to a unilateral freezing lesion (FL) using a cooled steel probe, placed over the right midline anteroposterior plane. Mice were allowed to survive for 12-14 weeks and then were submitted to behavioral tasks and brain morphological analyses. Injured mice from both genders did not present gross locomotor alterations, and the freezing lesion resulted in similar brain damage in male and female mice. Additionally, a selective disruption in the short-term social recognition memory was observed in injured male mice while the long-term inhibitory avoidance memory was not affected by both the factors. These results indicate a reduced susceptibility of female to short-term social-memory deficits induced by neonatal model of microgyria in mice, suggesting that the cognitive deficits induced by freezing lesions in rodents may not be entirely related to the severity of brain injury.