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Treating Generational Stress
- Source :
- Psychological Science. 27:1171-1180
- Publication Year :
- 2016
- Publisher :
- SAGE Publications, 2016.
-
Abstract
- Early-life adversity is a potent risk factor for mental-health disorders in exposed individuals, and effects of adversity are exhibited across generations. Such adversities are also associated with poor gastrointestinal outcomes. In addition, emerging evidence suggests that microbiota-gut-brain interactions may mediate the effects of early-life stress on psychological dysfunction. In the present study, we administered an early-life stressor (i.e., maternal separation) to infant male rats, and we investigated the effects of this stressor on conditioned aversive reactions in the rats' subsequent infant male offspring. We demonstrated, for the first time, longer-lasting aversive associations and greater relapse after extinction in the offspring (F1 generation) of rats exposed to maternal separation (F0 generation), compared with the offspring of rats not exposed to maternal separation. These generational effects were reversed by probiotic supplementation, which was effective as both an active treatment when administered to infant F1 rats and as a prophylactic when administered to F0 fathers before conception (i.e., in fathers' infancy). These findings have high clinical relevance in the identification of early-emerging putative risk phenotypes across generations and of potential therapies to ameliorate such generational effects.
- Subjects :
- Male
0301 basic medicine
Offspring
Physiology
Probiotic
Childhood amnesia
law.invention
Developmental psychology
Rats, Sprague-Dawley
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Memory
law
Cohort Effect
Animals
Humans
Clinical significance
Generational effects
Risk factor
Maternal separation
General Psychology
Inheritance
Maternal Deprivation
Probiotics
Stressor
Brain
Classical conditioning
Extinction
Extinction (psychology)
Infantile amnesia
Rats
Wills
030104 developmental biology
Female
Amnesia
Pavlovian conditioning
Psychology
Stress, Psychological
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14679280 and 09567976
- Volume :
- 27
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Psychological Science
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....1ab2e9cee6d82a693ac4093975aa9151