Many farm, laboratory, zoo and companion animals experience some form of maternal deprivation. This is typically via separation from their mothers earlier than would happen in free-living populations, in some cases even while young are still dependent upon milk. Maternal deprivation may also occur in a qualitative way, via inadequate maternal care, perhaps caused by inexperience or by restricti...

Infant rats deprived of food, maternal care, and the opportunity to suckle display a dramatic behavioral activation and vigorously ingest when provided milk through oral cannulas. These experiments assessed which components of deprivation are important in producing these responses to milk. Nutritional deprivation alone, with or without the presence of an active maternal female, appears to be su...

BACKGROUND Early life stress has been demonstrated to increase the risk of developing depression in adulthood. However, the roles and associated molecular mechanisms of stresses in the onset and relapse of depression have yet to be fully elucidated. METHODS Depression-like behaviors were induced in rats by maternal deprivation and chronic unpredictable stress. Depression- and anxiety-like beh...

Adverse experiences in early life have profound influences on the developing central nervous system (CNS) and change the behavior in adult life in human. To analyze the influences, one of the well-documented experimental manipulations is maternal deprivation in rats. Any types of maternal deprivations can alter pup developments in the CNS and change the behavior. Moreover, the researches provid...

Neonatal pain and stress induce long-term changes in pain sensitivity. Therefore their interrelation is a topical subject of clinical and basic research. The present study investigated the effects of inflammatory peripheral pain and stress of maternal deprivation (MD)-isolation in 1-2- and 7-8-day-old Wistar rats (P1,2 and P7,8 respectively, ages comparable to preterm and full-term human babies...

Food deprivation after weaning often has greater effects on the reproductive success of females than of males. However, if animals are deprived prenatally (that is, through food deprivation of the mother during gestation), the reproductive success of males may be more adversely affected than that of females because of a disruption in the organizational effects of testosterone in neonatal male m...

It is known from previous research that physical exercise prevents long-term memory deficits induced by maternal deprivation in rats. But we could not assume similar effects of physical exercise on short-term memory, as short- and long-term memories are known to result from some different memory consolidation processes. Here we demonstrated that, in addition to long-term memory deficit, the sho...

Under typical conditions, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) connections with the amygdala are immature during childhood and become adult-like during adolescence. Rodent models show that maternal deprivation accelerates this development, prompting examination of human amygdala-mPFC phenotypes following maternal deprivation. Previously institutionalized youths, who experienced early maternal depriv...

Introduction Protein synthesis and accretion are the cornerstones of growth that provide the structural framework and enzymatic machinery necessary for fetal development. The maternal uterine circulation supplies the components that the fetus uses for protein accretion. All are derived from the maternal diet or maternal tissue stores. It is important to explore the regulatory processes within t...

Early partial maternal deprivation causes long-lasting neurochemical, behavioral and brain structural effects. In rats, it causes a deficit in memory consolidation visible in adult life. Some of these deficits can be reversed by donepezil and galantamine, which suggests that they may result from an impairment of brain cholinergic transmission. One such deficit, representative of all others, is ...