Early life stress is associated with anxiety, increased stress responsivity and preference for “comfort foods” in adult female rats

Abstract

Chronic stress increases anxiety and encourages intake of palatable foods as "comfort foods". This effect seems to be mediated by altered function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. In the current study, litters of Wistar rats were subjected to limited access to nesting material (Early-Life Stress group - ELS) or standard care (Control group) from postnatal day 2 to 9. In adult life, anxiety was assessed using the novelty-suppressed feeding test (NSFT), and acute stress responsivity by measurement of plasma corticosterone and ACTH levels. Preference for palatable foods was monitored by a computerized system (BioDAQ, Research Diets(®)) in rats receiving only regular chow or given the choice of regular and palatable diet for 30 days. ELS-augmented adulthood anxiety in the NSFT (increased latency to eat in a new environment; decreased chow intake upon return to the home cage) and increased corticosterone (but not ACTH) secretion in response to stress. Despite being lighter and consuming less rat chow, ELS animals ate more palatable foods during chronic exposure compared with controls. During preference testing, controls receiving long-term access to palatable diet exhibited reduced preference for the diet relative to controls exposed to regular chow only, whereas ELS rats demonstrated no such reduction in preference after prolonged palatable diet exposure. The increased preference for palatable foods showed by ELS animals may result from a habit of using this type of food to ameliorate anxiety.

Toward Understanding How Early-Life Stress Reprograms Cognitive and Emotional Brain Networks

“…The consequences of early-life (prenatal as well as postnatal) stress on emotional and social behaviors have been a subject of several recent reviews (eg, Sandi and Haller, 2015;Nishi et al, 2014). Here, we summarize in Table form the consequences of chronic early-life adversity provoked by abnormal maternal care in the limited bedding-nesting environment (Gilles et al, 1996;Molet et al, 2014), a model recently adopted and adapted by over 50 laboratories around the world (eg, Raineki et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2011;Bolton et al, 2013;Machado et al, 2013;Maniam et al, 2014;Kohl et al, 2015;Naninck et al, 2015; Table 1). …”

Ginger-induced Ileal Motility is Modified by Stress: Sex Differences in Rats

“…For example, chronic and strong stress induced decrease of food intake and loss of body weight [14], whereas mild stress increased food intake, especially that of highly palatable foods [15][16][17][18]. It is also reported that stress strongly modified ileal motility and that there were sex differences in the effects of stress-loading [19,20].…”

Alterations in the hypothalamic pituitary thyroid axis in animals submitted to early-life trauma

“…Both diets were produced by the Prag Soluções Biociências  Laboratory (São Paulo, Brazil), aiming to minimize possible biases. Data from food intake can be found in another publication 1 .…”

“…Exposure to early-life trauma leads to behavioral changes in adulthood 1,2 as well as to changes in the functioning of the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis mediated by alterations in maternal care 1 . By observing the natural variations of maternal care in rats, researchers have classified dams as high-and low-caring mothers.…”