Maternal separation exaggerates spontaneous recovery of extinguished contextual fear in adult female rats.

Early life stress increases the risk of posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSD). Patients with PTSD show impaired extinction of traumatic memory, and in women, this occurs more often when PTSD is preceded by child trauma. However, it is still unclear how early life stress accounts for extinction impairment. Here, we studied the effects of maternal separation (MS, postnatal day 2 to 14) on contextual fear extinction in adult female rats. Additionally, to examine changes in synaptic function affected by MS, we measured long-term potentiation (LTP) in prefrontal cortex and hippocampus in vitro, both of which have been implicated in fear extinction. We found that adult female rats had been subjected to MS exhibited significant spontaneous recovery of fear to the extinguished context. Furthermore, MS exposure resulted in LTP impairment in both infralimbic prefrontal cortex layer 2/3-layer 5 and hippocampal SC-CA1 pathways. Interestingly, no obvious effects of MS on contextual fear conditioning, fear recall as well as extinction training and recall were observed. Innate fear in the elevated plus maze or open field test remained nearly unaffected. These findings provided the first evidence that MS may exaggerate spontaneous recovery after contextual fear extinction, for which LTP impairment in the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus may be responsible, thereby possibly leading to impaired extinction associated with PTSD.