NEUROBEHAVIORAL EFFECTS OF MATERNAL SEPARATION BOTH IN THE MOTHER AND THE OFFSPRING

AGUGGIA J; RIVAROLA MA; SUAREZ M

Buenos Aires

Congreso; FALAN 2016; 2016

Although mother-infant relationships differ between species, mother-infant bonding is universal to all mammalian species, with potential benefits for both. Mothers shape socio-emotional development, serving as essential external regulators of infant neurodevelopment, physiology, behavior, and emotion. The pups, on the other hand, represent a rich set of sensory cues that can enrich the mother's environment. By providing such stimuli, the pups may ensure both their own and their mother's development and survival. The disruption of mother-infant relationship (such as maternal separation) can affect the well-being of both the mother and her offspring. In our laboratory, the model of early environmental manipulation of mother-infant relationships consists of 4.5 h daily separations performed from birth until weaning on postnatal day 21. Then we assessed different neurobehavioral responses to such manipulation on the offspring and on mothers.As adults, maternally separated animals compared with controls (non-maternally separated) has particular behavioral and endocrine changes (ACTH, corticosterone and catecholamines), both basal and in response to stress. Thereafter we have studied whether environmental enrichment during adolescence could reverse or compensate the effects of early maternal separation on learning and memory processes and hippocampal neuronal activity. In the offspring environmental enrichment EE has been used as a procedure that might prevent some of the deleterious effects of stress and, moreover, EE could reverse most of the effects of juvenile stress at the behavioral and biochemical levels. We demonstrated that both early and peripubertal environment can alter, either independently or in conjunction, some important phenotypic profiles with high adaptive significance on adulthood.Considering the importance of a normal interaction between mother and pups during early postnatal life and their relationship to the development of psychopathology for mothers and offspring, this work also presents an approach to the neurobiological impact on mothers produced by prolonged separation from their offspring. In the dams the stress of maternal separation during the post-partum induced alterations in the pup-retrieval behavior, increased anxiety-like behavior, and had a detrimental effect on cognitive processes which was prevented by the rewarding aspects of physical contact with pups. Understanding how an undisturbed mother-infant relationship modulates the neurochemical, physiological and behavioral profiles in dams will contribute to a better knowledge of postpartum psychiatric disorders and the detrimental outcome of separations for both the mother and child.