[Fetal pain: immediate and long term consequences].

Several situations are potentially painful for fetuses, such as malformations and invasive procedures. Nociceptive pathways are known to be functional at 26 weeks. Even if it is not possible to evaluate the fetal experience of pain, it is essential to examine its immediate and long-term consequences.

Hypo-response of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis after an ethanol challenge in prenatally stressed adolescent male rats.

The period of adolescence and environmental factors, such as stress, are important in determining ethanol vulnerability in both humans and rats. Ethanol is a powerful activator of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis but attenuated responses of the HPA axis to ethanol have been described in populations with a high risk of ethanol abuse. In rats, prenatal stress leads to prolonged stress-induced corticosterone secretion and increases the vulnerability to drugs of abuse, such as amphetamine and nicotine in adulthood and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine in adolescent rats.

Stress during gestation induces lasting effects on emotional reactivity of the dam rat.

Human and animal studies indicate that repeated stress during pregnancy can produce long-term biological and behavioural disorders in the offspring. In contrast, although maternal stress is supposed to induce an increase of maternal anxiety, few studies have been conducted to demonstrate it. Therefore, in the present study we examined the emotional reactivity in stressed (chronic restraint stress applied 3 x 45 min per day during the last week of pregnancy) and unstressed females rats after the weaning of their pups.