Early-life stress leads to sex-dependent changes in pubertal timing in rats that are reversed by a probiotic formulation.
Dev Psychobiol
; 61(5): 679-687, 2019 07.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-30043520
ABSTRACT
Puberty marks the beginning of a period of dramatic physical, hormonal, and social change. This instability has made adolescence infamous as a time of "storm and stress" and it is well-established that stress during adolescence can be particularly damaging. However, prior stress may also shape the adolescent experience. In the present series of experiments, we observed sex-specific effects of early-life maternal separation stress on the timing of puberty onset in the rat. Specifically, stressed females exhibited earlier pubertal onset compared to standard-reared females, whereas stressed males matured later than their standard-reared counterparts. Further, we demonstrated that a probiotic treatment restores the normative timing of puberty onset in rodents of both sexes. These results are in keeping with previous findings that probiotics reverse stress-induced changes in learned fear behaviors and stress hormone levels, highlighting the remarkable and wide-ranging restorative effects of probiotics in the context of early-life stress.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Sexual Maturation
/
Stress, Psychological
/
Probiotics
/
Maternal Deprivation
Limits:
Animals
Language:
En
Journal:
Dev Psychobiol
Year:
2019
Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Australia