Sex-Dependent Effects of Prenatal Stress on Learned Helplessness and Anxiety-Related Behaviours in Wistar Rats

  1. Inês Pereira-Figueiredo 1
  2. Consuelo Sancho 123
  3. Juan Carro 13
  4. Dolores E. López 124
  5. Ricardo Gómez-Nieto 124
  6. Orlando Castellano 124
  1. 1 Neuroscience Institute of Castilla y León, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain.
  2. 2 Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Salamanca
    info

    Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Salamanca

    Salamanca, España

    ROR https://ror.org/03em6xj44

  3. 3 Universidad de Salamanca
    info

    Universidad de Salamanca

    Salamanca, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02f40zc51

  4. 4 Department of Cell Biology and Pathology, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain.
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Revista:
Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science

ISSN: 2160-5866,  2160-5874

Año de publicación: 2015

Volumen: 5

Número: 7

Páginas: 251-265

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.4236/JBBS.2015.57026 GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Otras publicaciones en: Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science

Resumen

There has been an increasing importance of studies that link sex to stress coping processes. Recently, we reported that male and female Wistar rats responded differently to prenatal stress (PS) under basal conditions. The aim of the present study was to determine the influence of sex on behaviour and coping strategies, as an effect of gestational adversity in rats that were exposed to an uncontrollable stressor. Once the animals reached adulthood, the offspring from stressed/non-stressed dams were subjected or not to antidepressant treatment with Sertraline. After that, they were exposed to a single inescapable shock (IS) session, in which the rats were further tested for escape behaviour along 10 days, as a model of learned helplessness (LH). In prenatally stressed animals after the IS, behavioural differences appeared in a sex specific manner. Males proved to be more susceptible to the adverse context than females, exhibiting behavioural despair in a large percentage of the cases. Surprisingly, PS did not affect shock escape failure, but did affect learning performance in a sex dependent manner. In females, PS led them to learn to avoid shocks, learning better than controls, and by contrast, PS males did not learn to avoid shocks and displayed some signs of anhedonia. Sertraline did not help animals to avoid shocks, but helped them to escape from it. Our data indicate the existence of sex dependent behavioural differences in PS animals when facing an uncontrollable stress situation, in which the changes induced by PS were not only different, but opposite between sexes.

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