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Maternal separation followed by isolation‐housing differentially affects prepulse inhibition of the acoustic startle response in C57BL/6 mice
Author(s) -
Bailoo Jeremy D.,
Varholick Justin A.,
Garza Xavier J.,
Jordan Richard L.,
Hintze Sara
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
developmental psychobiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.055
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1098-2302
pISSN - 0012-1630
DOI - 10.1002/dev.21422
Subject(s) - prepulse inhibition , weaning , psychology , social isolation , separation (statistics) , startle response , offspring , isolation (microbiology) , developmental psychology , medicine , psychiatry , neuroscience , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , biology , pregnancy , microbiology and biotechnology , machine learning , computer science , genetics
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.