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Early Life Adversity
Early life adversity can refer to childhood neglect, such as experiences in foster care, orphanage care or parental neglect and abuse. Effects from early life adversity can very in human children, from emotional deficits such as depression and anxiety, attention disorders ranging from ADHD, recognition disorders, psychiatric disorders and stress. To study these deficits and to look for both pharmacological and non-pharmacological solutions, maternal separation (MS) in rodents is used to replicate potential deficits postnatally.
Early life adversity in humans also takes form prenatally, depending on the physical or mental stressors the mother may experience- instances include both intentional and unintentional harm. Unintentional harm such as illness, or stress and intentional harm such as alcohol consumption have the potential to trigger maternal pregnancy inflammation; with possible deficits to emerge at ~6 months after birth.
Maternal Separation in Rodents
Maternal separation (MS) in rodents refers to the period of time when rodent pups are removed from their mother for certain periods of time. In order to replicate the deficits caused by early life adversity, rodents are typically removed from their mother for 3 to 24 hours per day. This causes unpredictable variations in maternal care once returned to their mothers, where maternal stress + maternal separation subjects the pups to early life adversity.
In our lab, we separate CD-1 mice from their mother for the first two weeks of life for 3 hours a day. They are kept in a room separate from their mother in order to prevent inaudible vocalization to be heard from either the mother or pups.
Environmental Enrichment
A focus of the research lab is to apply non-pharmacological approaches to combat the effects of early life adversity. A form of this we focus on is the use of environmental enrichment (EE) in CD-1 mice. Environmental enrichment involves supplying mice post weaning with 'mind stimulating' or 'enriching' activity. This is typically in the form of supply toys such as wheels, tunnels, balls, cups, or rings- which is meant to occupy the time or dedicate time in which the mouse is interacting or focusing on non-stressing material.
Previous studies within and outside the lab have shown to reverse the effects of MS, where MS mice have even been seen to outperform control mice who have also been environmentally enriched (Cornwell et al., 2018) in given tasks. From this we aim to replicate or test the limits EE may have on MS involving different aspects of early adversity.
Experimental Design
In order to use CD-1 mice as a model for early life adversity in human children, the behavioral tasks we use to analyze the effects of MS are the the sociability task, the odor preference task, the open field task, the radial arm maze and the novel object recognition task.
Usings these tasks respectively we are able to piece specific deficits and effects MS may cause in which aspect of life, and what areas of the brain are specifically influenced/ involved in MS. Please click each task title to learn more about each task and what they represent.
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