CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Adverse events early in life have been linked to a maladaptivestress response in adulthood that can predispose individuals topsychiatric and physiological disorders when they become adults.Postnatal stress and maternal separation (MS) in particular, show avariety of long term neurochemical, hormonal and behaviouralchanges. MS has serious consequences on the central nervoussystem (CNS), some of which are associated with the glutamatergicsystem. The changes induced by maternal separation and stressfulexperiences in the offspring might be associated with alcohol intakeand drug abuse during adulthood. We evaluated the consequences ofchronic early life manipulations on alcohol intake and glutamatetransporters (GluT) on adolescent rats. In chronic maternal separation(CMS), from postnatal day (PD) 7 the pups were separated fromtheir mothers and exposed to cold stress for 1 h during 20 days.Then animals were exposed to a voluntary ethanol (6%) intake for7 days. We measured Glu uptake using time course and kineticparameters on synaptosomes isolated from frontal cortex (FC) andhippocampus (Hic). Along with immunoblotting we measured theexpression levels of the transporters subtypes: EAAC1 and GLT-1.Besides, we evaluated the plasmatic levels of corticosterone,catecholamines and transaminases. Stressed groups signi"cantlyincreased ethanol consumption and showed changes in glutamateuptake. We observed hormonal changes in all treatments, corticosteroneand catecholamines levels ranged in all groups, showing analteration in the hormonal stress response. These results suggest thatan exposure to CMS increases alcohol intake, modify GluT activityand alters the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, whichcould be relevant to the GluT function in the adult rat brain. Again,the importance of adverse events early in life on the drugcosumption and GluT functioning in adulthood becomes evident.