CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Adverse events early in life have been linked to a maladaptive stress response in adulthood that can predispose individuals to psychiatric and physiological disorders when they become adults. Postnatal stress and maternal separation (MS) in particular, show a variety of long term neurochemical, hormonal and behavioural changes. MS has serious consequences on the central nervous system (CNS), some of which are associated with the glutamatergic system. The changes induced by maternal separation and stressful experiences in the offspring might be associated with alcohol intake and drug abuse during adulthood. We evaluated the consequences of chronic early life manipulations on alcohol intake and glutamate transporters (GluT) on adolescent rats. In chronic maternal separation (CMS), from postnatal day (PD) 7 the pups were separated from their mothers and exposed to cold stress for 1h during 20 days. Then animals were exposed to a voluntary ethanol (6%) intake for 7 days. We measured Glu uptake using time course and kinetic parameters on synaptosomes isolated from frontal cortex (FC) and hippocampus (Hic). Along with immunoblotting we measured the expression levels of the transporters subtypes: EAAC1 and GLT-1. Besides, we evaluated the plasmatic levels of corticosterone, catecholamines and transaminases. Stressed groups significantly increased ethanol consumption and showed changes in glutamate uptake. We observed hormonal changes in all treatments, corticosterone and catecholamines levels ranged in all groups, showing an alteration in the hormonal stress response. These results suggest that an exposure to CMS increases alcohol intake, modify GluT activity and alters the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which could be relevant to the GluT function in the adult rat brain. Again, the importance of adverse events early in life on the drug cosumption and GluT functioning in adulthood becomes evident.