Maternal separation impairs mother's cognition 1 month beyond the separation

Abstract

Background: Separation of pups from their dam during the infancy not only has detrimental effects on the pups' brain but also affects dams' behavior. Postpartum stress may affect mothers' cognitive functions. In the present study, by using a 180 min/day maternal separation (MS) paradigm, we assessed anxiety-like behavior (in the elevated plus maze) and locomotor activity (in the open eld) of rat dams which experienced separation from postnatal day (PND) 1 until weaning. Since no study has ever investigated MS effects on spatial learning and memory of dams in the Morris water maze, we tried for the rst time to clarify whether such separation impairs dam's performance in the Morris water maze.Methods:We assessed dams' behavior at three time points; 24 hours, 1 week and 1 month after weaning.Therefore, the six groups consisted of control (CTRL); 24h, 1week and 1month and MS; 24h, 1week and 1month was allocated in this study.Results: Our results revealed that although MS-24h and MS-1week groups had intact locomotor activity, MS-1month group showed less locomotor activity in the open eld. Moreover, MS induced anxiety-like behavior was more pronounced in MS-1week and MS-1month dams. Spatial learning and memory was also impaired only in MS-1month dams.Conclusions: We can conclude that MS induces cognitive impairments in dam that may appear not immediately after the separation, but a few weeks after such stressful event.

Brief versus long maternal separation in lactating rats: Consequences on maternal behavior, emotionality, and brain oxytocin receptor binding

“…Interestingly, maternal motivation was normalized after 1 week of separation thereby demonstrating that the mothers might have adapted to the daily separation distress. 55 On the contrary, BMS dams did not show alterations in maternal motivation (Figures 2A,B and 3). These findings are consistent with previous studies demonstrating a slower pup retrieval of dams that had been separated from their pups for 180-min or even 360-min versus 15-min.…”

“…LMS resulted in reduced maternal motivation both in the home cage on LD1 (Figure 2C–D) and in a novel, and more challenging, arena (Figure 3). Interestingly, maternal motivation was normalized after 1 week of separation thereby demonstrating that the mothers might have adapted to the daily separation distress 55 . On the contrary, BMS dams did not show alterations in maternal motivation (Figures 2A,B and 3).…”