Neuroscience
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Gestation is a time of profound vulnerability, as insults during pregnancy increase the lifelong risk of morbidity for the offspring. Increasingly, maternal diet is recognized as a key factor influencing the developing fetus. Poor-quality maternal diets, whether they provide an excess or an insufficiency of nutrients, lead to overt gestational growth disturbances in the offspring, and elevated risk for a common cluster of metabolic and mental disorders. ⋯ In contrast, offspring of maternal high-fat and low-protein diets mounted essentially no gene expression response to either stressor. However, male and female offspring of all conditions showed elevated hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal glucocorticoid responses to both stressors, though the recovery of corticosterone responses after stress termination was significantly impaired in offspring of poor-quality maternal diets. Overall, it appears that the ability of the hypothalamus to respond in the immediate aftermath of stressful experiences is severely impaired in offspring of poor-quality maternal diets, regardless of whether the diet provided insufficient nutrients or excessive nutrients.
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Volatile organic solvent abuse continues to be a worldwide health problem, including the neurobehavioral teratogenic sequelae of toluene abuse during pregnancy. Although abuse levels of prenatal toluene exposure can lead to a Fetal Solvent Syndrome, there is little research examining these effects on memory. Consumption of toluene can have detrimental effects on the developing hippocampus which could lead to specific spatial learning and memory deficits. ⋯ Male and female offspring (N=104) were observed in the MWM for 5days beginning on postnatal day (PN) 28 and again on PN44. While prenatal toluene-exposed animals did not differ in initial acquisition in the MWM, rats prenatally exposed to 12,000ppm toluene displayed performance deficits during a probe trial and in reversal learning on PN44. Overall, this study indicates that prenatal exposure to repeated inhaled abuse patterns of high concentrations of toluene can impair spatial memory function that persists into adolescence.