Effect of Chronic Stress on Immune Response and Behavior in Female and Male Mice Subject to Prenatal Stress

CECILIA GABRIELA PASCUAN; MARÍA LAURA PALUMBO; ANA MARÍA GENARO

Dresden

Congreso; 8th Congress of the International Society for NeuroImmunoModulation (ISNIM) together with the German Endocrine-Brain-Immune Network (GEBIN); 2011

ISNIM and GEBIN

Prenatal Stress (PS) has been associated with behavioral and immune changes in adult life. The aim of this work was to investigate alterations in immune response and behavior in adult female and male mice subjected to PS and their response to chronic stress. For this purpose, pregnant mice were individually restrained 2 hours a day, from gestational day 14 until delivery. A group of PS offspring (2-month-old) was exposed to chronic stress by immobilization for 3 weeks. Results showed that PS in both females and males did not induce significant changes in the proliferative response in vitro. However, the effect of chronic stress on the immune response was different in mice exposed or not to prenatal stress. In control mice, chronic stress induced an increase in immune response in males but not in females. However, in PS animals, the immune response of female mice was decreased while there were no changes respect to control mice in males. On the other hand, both PS females and males showed similar performance in the Y-maze task compared to control mice. Exposure to chronic stress in PS females caused a significant decrease of the alternation spontaneous behavior. On contrary, chronic stress did not induce changes in the percentage of spontaneous alternations in PS males respect to control mice. Finally, corticosterone and catecholamine levels did not change in both female and male submitted to PS. In a similar way, the exposure of control and PS mice to chronic stress did not induce alterations in hormones levels. These results indicate that females are more sensitive to the deleterious effect of chronic stress when they were exposed to prenatal stress. The deregulation of classically associated stress hormones does not appear to be involved in this effe