Aksić Milan, Radonjić Nevena V, Aleksić Dubravka, Jevtić Gordana, Marković Branka, Petronijević Nataša, Radonjić Vidosava, Filipović Branislav
Institute of Anatomy "Niko Miljanic", Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia,
Acta Neurobiol Exp (Wars). 2013;73(3):394-403. doi: 10.55782/ane-2013-1946.
Maternal deprivation (MD) leads to a variety of behavioral changes in rats which closely resemble the symptoms of schizophrenia in humans. With the aim to investigate the morphological changes which underlie the behavioral insults in this experimental paradigm we exposed 9-day-old Wistar rats to a 24 h MD. At the period of young adulthood rats were sacrificed for morphometric analysis and their brains were compared to the control group. Rats exposed to MD had a decrease in hippocampal volume (71 percent of the control value) as well as a decrease in the size of pyramidal (62 percent of the control) and granular (60 percent of the control) cell layers. Also, there was a decrease in the thickness of the prefrontal, retrosplenial and motor cortex compared to the control group. Analysis of the density of NeuN-immunolabeled neurons revealed a reduction in retrosplenial and prefrontal cortex (70 percent and 81 percent of the control, respectively), while there was no difference in the motor cortex. Western blot analysis confirmed a decrease in NeuN expression in the MD group compared to the control rat brain homogenates. The results of this study show that early stress in life has a long-term effect on the morphology of cognitive brain regions, most probably due to the loss of neurons during postnatal development and further contributes to our understanding of the effects of maternal separation on brain development.
母体剥夺（MD）会导致大鼠出现多种行为变化，这些变化与人类精神分裂症的症状极为相似。为了研究这种实验范式中行为损伤背后的形态学变化，我们将9日龄的Wistar大鼠暴露于24小时的母体剥夺环境中。在成年期，处死大鼠进行形态计量分析，并将它们的大脑与对照组进行比较。暴露于母体剥夺的大鼠海马体积减小（为对照组值的71%），锥体细胞层（为对照组的62%）和颗粒细胞层（为对照组的60%）大小也减小。此外，与对照组相比，前额叶、压后皮质和运动皮质的厚度也有所减小。对NeuN免疫标记神经元密度的分析显示，压后皮质和前额叶皮质中的神经元密度降低（分别为对照组的70%和81%），而运动皮质中则没有差异。蛋白质免疫印迹分析证实，与对照大鼠脑匀浆相比，母体剥夺组中NeuN的表达降低。本研究结果表明，生命早期的应激对认知脑区的形态有长期影响,这很可能是由于出生后发育过程中神经元的丧失所致，并且进一步有助于我们理解母体分离对大脑发育的影响。
