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There is no systematic sensory-perceptual deficit in AN patients, and specifically, not in gustatory function. The few differences shown might be due to fear of food-related stimuli or comorbidity.

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To discover whether the accumulation of life's experiences, adverse and enriching, inform, and serve the following generation by inheritance we examine whether stress to a weanling female will influence her future offspring, whether prereproductive enrichment to the dam, or postweaning enrichment to the offspring, can reverse the transgenerational effects of stress, and whether, like adversity, enrichment might have transgenerational effects. Female rats were exposed to stressors when they were 27-29 days old. Half of these females and their controls were then raised in an enriched environment from weaning until mating at 60 days to examine whether preproduction enrichment reverses the effects of preproduction stress on offspring. Half of the offspring of each group were raised in an enriched environment after weaning, to see whether it reverses the effects of preproduction stress and buttresses prereproductive enrichment. Behavior was examined in 625 adult offspring in 16 groups covering all permutations of the experimental variables (preproduction weanling stress (PS), preproduction enrichment (PE), offspring enrichment (OE), sex). Exploration, avoidance learning, startle, and social interaction were tested. Results reveal that very early prereproductive experience in females, adverse or enriching, will transgenerationally influence their future offspring, depending on the behavior tested and sex. Our finding that enrichment, whether to the parent or offspring generation, can ameliorate the transgenerational impact of adversity, has novel implications for the malleability of transgenerational inheritance, and its individual, social, and therapeutic impact.

Perinatal adverse experience programs social and emotional behavioral traits and is a major risk factor for the development of behavioral and psychiatric disorders. Little information is available on how adversity to the mother prior to her first pregnancy (preconception stress, PCS) may affect brain structural development, which may underlie behavioral dysfunction in the offspring. Moreover, little is known about possible sex-dependent consequences of PCS in the offspring. This study examined spine number/density and dendritic length/complexity of layer II/III pyramidal neurons in the anterior cingulate (ACd), prelimbic/infralimbic (PL/IL) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) of male and female rats born to mothers exposed to unpredictable variable stress at different time points prior to reproduction. Our main findings are that in line with our hypothesis adversity to the mother before her pregnancy results in highly complex changes in neuronal morphology in the medial prefrontal, but not in the orbitofrontal cortical regions of her future offspring that persist into adulthood. Moreover, our study revealed that (1) in the PCS2 group (offspring of dams mated two weeks after stress) spine numbers and dendritic length and complexity were increased in response to PCS in the ACd and PL/IL, (2) these regional effects depended on the temporal proximity of adversity and conception, (3) in the ACd of the PCS2 group only males and the left hemispheres were affected. We speculate that these transgenerational brain structural changes are mediated by stress-induced epigenetic (re)programming of future gene activity in the oocyte.

Salt appetite was investigated in 14 patients with congenital adrenal hyperplasia of the salt-wasting form (SW group), 12 patients with the simple virilized form who are not salt losing, and 18 healthy siblings. Salt appetite was evaluated by questionnaire, preference tests, and dietary analyses. The findings showed that SW who were not therapeutically normalized showed increased salt appetite but no change in sweet preference. Their salt appetite correlated with symptoms of salt wasting, namely, plasma renin activity, plasma K(+), and urine Na(+) and (inversely) with blood pressure. Sensitivity to the taste of NaCl was not altered. Factor analyses of a larger group confirmed the distinction between salt appetite and sweet preference, but intake of dietary Na(+) and sweet carbohydrates and intake of salty and sweet snacks did not reflect distinct salt or sweet preferences. We confirm that putative perinatal dehydration, due to maternal nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, childhood vomiting, and diarrhea with occasional saline infusion, was related to increased salt appetite in adolescence. The findings suggest that salt appetite in humans is determined by interdependent, innate, physiological, and acquired attributes. Salt appetite in SW patients is an adaptive response mediated by the renin-angiotensin system, an innate predisposition to acquire salt preference (in anticipation of both sodium loss and its consequence), and imprinting by perinatal hyponatremic occurrences. Our findings contribute to understanding human salt intake, provide insight into the motivation for salt in patients with congenital adrenal hyperplasia 21-OH deficiency, and may point the way to improvements in therapeutic compliance in these patients.

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