Back
Full-text
Journal article

Maternal separation followed by isolation-housing differentially affects prepulse inhibition of the acoustic startle response in C57BL/6 mice.

  • Bailoo JD Division of Animal Welfare, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
  • Varholick JA Division of Animal Welfare, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
  • Garza XJ Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina.
  • Jordan RL Department of Psychology, The University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina.
  • Hintze S Division of Animal Welfare, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
  • 2016-05-03
Published in:
  • Developmental psychobiology. - 2016
early handling
isolation-housing
match/mismatch hypothesis
maternal separation
prepulse inhibition
Animals
Female
Housing, Animal
Male
Maternal Deprivation
Mice
Mice, Inbred C57BL
Prepulse Inhibition
Reflex, Startle
Social Isolation
English Exposure to chronic stress is associated with an increased incidence of neuropsychiatric dysfunction. The current study evaluated two competing hypotheses, the cumulative stress and the match/mismatch hypothesis of neuropsychiatric dysfunction, using two paradigms relating to exposure to "stress": pre-weaning maternal separation and post-weaning isolation-housing. C57BL/6 offspring were reared under four conditions: typical animal facility rearing (AFR, control), early handling (EH, daily 15 min separation from dam), maternal separation (MS, daily 4 hr separation from dam), and maternal and peer separation (MPS, daily 4 hr separation from dam and from littermates). After weaning, mice were either housed socially (2-3/cage) or in isolation (1/cage) and then tested for prepulse inhibition in adulthood. Isolation-housed MPS subjects displayed greater deficits in prepulse inhibition relative to socially-housed MPS subjects while socially-housed AFR subjects displayed greater deficits in prepulse inhibition relative to isolation-housed AFR subjects. The results indicate that these treatment conditions represent a potentially valuable model for evaluating the match/mismatch hypothesis in regards to neuropsychiatric dysfunction.
Language
  • English
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/404
Statistics
Document views: 36 File downloads:
  • Full-text: 0