Prenatal exposure to the antiandrogen flutamide affects mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic system in rats

PALLARÉS ME; PALLARÉS HM; ADROVER E; BAIER CJ; ANTONELLI MC

San Diego. California.

Simposio; 43rd Annual Meeting of the Society of Neuroscience; 2013

Society for Neuroscience

Our group has a long standing interest on the long term consequences of prenatal stress (PS) on the development of the corticolimbic dopaminergic (DA) system. We have demonstrated that PS induced impairments on DA metabolism that were differentially affected after puberty, suggesting that perinatal events might render the DA circuitry more vulnerable to puberty variation of the hormonal circulating events (Baier et al, 2012; Pallarés et al, 2013b). Moreover, we found that PS also induced long-term effects on male offspring reproductive system by disrupting perinatal testosterone surges: PS feminised the development of the external genitalia and induced an imbalance of reproductive axis hormones levels (Pallarés et al, 2013a). Since perinatal gonadal hormones exert organizational effects on the brain maturation, and considering that PS interferes with the normal development of DA system, our aim was to assess the sexual hormones organizational effects on DA development. In this context, we simulate PS effects by prenatally administering the androgen receptor antagonist: flutamide.