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Published on: July 12, 2024
Neonatal resource scarcity alters maternal care and impacts offspring core temperature and growth in rats
Elizabeth A Shupe1, Sarah M Clinton1
1School of Neuroscience, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg, Virginia, USA.
Insights
Early life adversity, like limited resources, impacts maternal care in rats. Neonatal limited bedding stress affected offspring
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Animal Behavior
Background:
- Childhood adversity, such as poverty or inconsistent parental care, increases adult vulnerability to poor physical and mental health.
- Limited resource availability in early life is a known stressor that can negatively affect maternal behavior and offspring development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how limited resource availability impacts maternal behavior in Sprague Dawley rats.
- To examine the physiological and behavioral outcomes in offspring exposed to early life adversity.
Main Methods:
- Early life adversity was induced using a neonatal limited bedding (NLB) stress model in rats from postnatal days 2-9.
- Maternal care behaviors (pup-directed and self-directed) and behavioral transitions were observed.
- Offspring core body temperature, body weight gain, and adult social and emotional behaviors were assessed.
Main Results:
- NLB stress altered maternal care, increasing pup-directed behaviors and decreasing self-directed behaviors.
- NLB-exposed pups showed lower core body temperatures and reduced body weight gain during development.
- Adult offspring did not exhibit significant changes in social or emotional behaviors in standard tests.
Conclusions:
- Early life adversity, specifically limited resource availability, significantly impacts maternal care in rodents.
- Neonatal limited bedding stress disrupts metabolic and thermoregulatory functions in developing offspring.
- While early adversity affects certain physiological outcomes, its impact on adult emotional and social behavior in this model was not significant.
Abstract:
Stressful experiences during childhood, including poverty and inconsistent parental care, can enhance vulnerability for worsened physical and mental health outcomes in adulthood. Using Sprague Dawley rats, the present study explored the impact of limited resource availability on maternal behavior and physiological and emotional behavior outcomes in the offspring. Early life adversity was induced by incorporating aspects of the limited bedding and nesting and scarcity models, wherein limited resource availability has previously been shown to provoke unpredictable or adverse maternal care respectively. In our hands, neonatal limited bedding (NLB) stress during postnatal days (P)2-9 altered maternal care, augmenting pup-directed behaviors and reducing self-directed behaviors, and modestly increased the frequency of transitions between discrete behaviors across consecutive timed observations. NLB-exposed pups had lower core body temperatures immediately following the stressful manipulation and exhibited decreased body weight gain across development. However, NLB exposure did not impact adult offspring's social or emotional behavior outcomes in the three-chamber social interaction, novelty-suppressed feeding, splash, or forced swim tests. These findings add to the literature demonstrating that early life adversity impacts maternal care in rodents and can disrupt certain metabolic and thermoregulatory outcomes in the offspring.
