Fetal alcohol and thymocyte phenotypes in offspring: response to food deprivation

Restriction of food availability is a reliable stimulus that leads to significant hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activation to which rats do not habituate. Based on our previous data that indicated that the HPA response to some, but not all, stressful stimuli is significantly greater in adult offspring of Sprague-Dawley dams exposed to 35% alcohol during the last 2 weeks of gestation than that of control rats and on the mounting neuroendocrine-immune literature that describes the role of pituitary-adrenal products in modulating cellular immunity, we hypothesized that the outcomes of food restriction would be significantly more marked in fetal alcohol-exposed (FAE) offspring, compared with control rats. Data we report herein show that--whereas food restriction at 30-35 days of age produced significant changes in body weight, thymus weight-to-body weight ratio, adrenal weight-to-body weight ratio, plasma corticosterone levels, and in thymocyte number, as well as in the percentage and absolute number of CD4+ and CD8+ thymocytes that express CD45RC-FAE and control rats were equally affected. We conclude that food restriction is another example of a stressful stimulus that fails to distinguish satisfactorily between FAE and control rats of prepubertal age.