Individual variations in maternal care early in life correlate with later life decision-making and c-fos expression in prefrontal subregions of rats.

Early life adversity affects hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis activity, alters cognitive functioning and in humans is thought to increase the vulnerability to psychopathology--e.g. depression, anxiety and schizophrenia--later in life.

Adult hippocampal glucocorticoid receptor expression and dentate synaptic plasticity correlate with maternal care received by individuals early in life.

Maternal care in mammals is the prevailing environmental influence during perinatal development. The adult rat offspring of mothers exhibiting increased levels of pup licking/grooming (LG; High LG mothers), compared to those reared by Low LG dams, show increased hippocampal glucocorticoid receptor expression, complex dendritic tree structure, and an enhanced capacity for synaptic potentiation. However, these data were derived from studies using the total amount of maternal care directed toward the entire litter, thus ignoring possible within-litter variation.

Early maternal deprivation affects dentate gyrus structure and emotional learning in adult female rats.

Rationale: Stress elicits functional and structural changes in the hippocampus. Early life stress is one of the major risk factors for stress-related pathologies like depression. Patients suffering from depression show a reduced hippocampal volume, and in women, this occurs more often when depression is preceded by childhood trauma.

Severe early life stress hampers spatial learning and neurogenesis, but improves hippocampal synaptic plasticity and emotional learning under high-stress conditions in adulthood.

Early life stress increases the risk for developing stress-related pathologies later in life. Recent studies in rats suggest that mild early life stress, rather than being overall unfavorable, may program the hippocampus such that it is optimally adapted to a stressful context later in life. Here, we tested whether this principle of "adaptive programming" also holds under severely adverse early life conditions, i.

Maternal care determines rapid effects of stress mediators on synaptic plasticity in adult rat hippocampal dentate gyrus.

Maternal care in the rat influences hippocampal development, synaptic plasticity and cognition. Previous studies, however, have examined animals under minimally stressful conditions. Here we tested the hypothesis that maternal care influences hippocampal function differently when this structure is exposed to corticosteroid and noradrenergic hormones, which are elevated during the early phase of a stress response.

Maternal care and hippocampal plasticity: evidence for experience-dependent structural plasticity, altered synaptic functioning, and differential responsiveness to glucocorticoids and stress.

Maternal licking and grooming (LG) in infancy influences stress responsiveness and cognitive performance in the offspring. We examined the effects of variation in the frequency of pup LG on morphological, electrophysiological, and behavioral aspects of hippocampal synaptic plasticity under basal and stress-like conditions. We found shorter dendritic branch length and lower spine density in CA1 cells from the adult offspring of low compared with high LG offspring.

Translational research into sexual disorders: pharmacology and genomics.

The existence of sexual dysfunctions in men, including premature and retarded ejaculation poses challenges to develop translational models in rats that may help in improving treatment and delineate the neural mechanisms of action. Most of our current understanding of the neurobiology, neuroanatomy and psychopharmacology of sexual behavior and ejaculatory function has been derived from preclinical studies in the rat. When large populations of male rats are tested on sexual activity during four successive tests, over time individual rats display a very stable sexual behavior that is either slow, normal or fast as characterized by the number of ejaculations performed.