Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 13, 2025
Moderate Prenatal Alcohol Exposure and Quantification of Social Behavior in Adult Rats
Published on: December 14, 2014
Effects of Cohabitation on Neurodevelopmental Outcomes in Rats Discordant for Neonatal Exposure to Sevoflurane
Ling-Sha Ju1, Timothy Morey1, Nikolaus Gravenstein1
1Department of Anesthesiology, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, Florida.
Background:
Having a sibling with autism spectrum disorder is a risk factor for autism spectrum disorder. We used a rat model in which the general anesthetic sevoflurane (SEVO) induces autism spectrum disorder-like neurodevelopmental abnormalities to test whether they can be transmitted via cohabitation.
Methods:
Male rat pups from several litters were mixed and randomized to 3 new litter types: SEVO-exposed (SEVO), SEVO-unexposed (control), and equal numbers of SEVO-exposed and SEVO-unexposed (MIXED). After weaning, rats in experiment 1 were housed with littermates in SEVO, control, and MIXED (MIXED-exposed and MIXED-unexposed) pairs. In experiment 2, MIXED-exposed and MIXED-unexposed rats were paired with an unfamiliar naïve cagemate. Corticosterone levels, gene expression, central inflammatory markers (experiment 1), and behavior and corticosterone levels (experiment 2) were assessed in adulthood.
Results:
In experiment 1, compared with control rats, SEVO rats exhibited abnormalities in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, inflammatory markers, oxytocin, arginine vasopressin, and DNA methylation systems. Almost all these measures in MIXED-exposed and MIXED-unexposed rats were statistically indistinguishable from and similar to those in SEVO or control rats, with most measures in MIXED rats being similar to those in SEVO rats. Experiment 2 showed that pairing with unfamiliar, naïve rats after weaning caused MIXED-unexposed and MIXED-exposed rats' behavior to be no different from that of control and SEVO rats, respectively; however, the 2 groups of MIXED rats also did not differ from each other.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that neurodevelopmental abnormalities can be transmitted to otherwise healthy individuals through interactions during cohabitation; however, subsequent pairing with unfamiliar, naïve cohabitants may weaken this interaction effect.
