Neurobiology of disease
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Neurobiology of disease · Aug 2014
Maternal sleep deprivation inhibits hippocampal neurogenesis associated with inflammatory response in young offspring rats.
Although sleep complaints are very common among pregnant women, the potential adverse effects of sleep disturbance on the offspring are not well studied. Growing evidence suggests that maternal stress can induce an inflammatory environment on the fetal development. But people are not sure about the consequences of prenatal stress such as the inflammatory responses induced by maternal sleep deprivation (MSD). ⋯ Real-time RT-PCR showed that after MSD, the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines (IL-1β, IL-6 and TNFα) increased in the hippocampus of offspring on PND 1, 7, 14 and 21, whereas anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10 reduced at the same time. Immunofluorescence found that the cells of activated microglia were higher in the brains of MSD offspring. Taken together, these results suggested that the MSD-induced inflammatory response is an important factor for neurogenesis impairment and neurobehavioral outcomes in prepuberty offspring.
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Neurobiology of disease · Aug 2014
Ketamine administered to pregnant rats in the second trimester causes long-lasting behavioral disorders in offspring.
Commonly used anesthetic agents, e.g. ketamine, may be neurotoxic to the developing brain but there has been little attention to the neurobehavioral consequences for offspring when used for maternal anesthesia. We hypothesize that treatment of pregnant rats with ketamine during the second trimester would affect brain development of the offspring. Pregnant rats on gestational day 14, about equal to midtrimester pregnancy in humans, received a sedative dose of ketamine intravenously for 2h. ⋯ These morphological abnormalities were associated with depression- and anxiety-like behaviors, and impaired memory up to young adult age. The treatment further caused NR2A receptor subunit up-regulation and NR2B receptor subunit, BDNF and PSD-95 down-regulation. These data suggest that maternal anesthesia with ketamine during the fetal brain development period can cause fetal brain damage and subsequent neurobehavioral abnormality, which is likely associated with the imbalanced expression of NMDA receptor subunits.