Influência da desnutrição proteica materna sobre as respostas comportamentais e após estresse imunológico na prole

Abstract

The maternal behavior (MB) is fundamental to offspring survival and this type of behavior alterations can cause behavioral changes on adult offspring. In this study we evaluated if maternal protein restriction might influence in behavioral responses of adult puppies. Our results demonstrated that mothers fed with the restricted diet presented MB increase; however, this increase did not change behavioral responses of adult puppies. It is known that maternal proteic malnutrition might be a contributory factor for psychiatric disorders on descendants. Between psychiatric disorders, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the biggest challenges to be faced in the whole world. Due to this fact, we tested the correlation between maternal proteic restriction with similar symptoms to the autism on male puppies and female adolescents using for this behavioral assays in rodents, which resemble to the main behavioral characteristics observed in humans with ASD. During lactation, in postnatal day 5 (PND 5) ultrasonic vocalizations quantification (USV) was accomplished as well as homing behavior analysis at PND 13. During adolescence, at PND 30-32 puppies were evaluated in open field tests, hole board, play social behavior and object recognizing test. Results demonstrated that puppies from mothers fed with hypoproteic diet vocalized less and besides this demonstrated impairment on social discrimination in homing behavior test. In adolescence, offspring of hypoproteic mothers of both sexes did not present locomotor activity in the open field test (OF); however, they exhibited a stereotyped behavior in whole board test, decrease of joking behavior and male puppies’ offspring presented a higher concern to explore the familiar object. These results show that maternal proteic restriction causes behaviors in offspring that resemble to the main behavioral characteristics associated with ASD. It is still known that maternal malnutrition might affect immunologic system development, thus knowing that the sickness behavior depends on the neuroimmune crosstalk, another study objective of ours was to evaluate maternal proteic restriction effects on sickness behavior, fever, neuroendocrine response and neuroinflammation of adult male offspring after 1000 μg/Kg (i.p.) administration of lipopolysaccharide (LPS). The sick behavior in this study was evaluated by open field tests, social interaction and forced swim, the neuroendocrine response through the evaluation of corticosterone levels and neuroinflammation by analyzing the level of expression of Fibrillary Acid Glial Protein by Western blotting. Our results assessed at 2 and 6 hours after LPS administration demonstrated that LPS induces prolonged sickness behavior in adult male offspring from mothers fed the hypoprotein diet, fever, increased TNF-níveis levels, and plasma corticosterone levels without changes in the expression of GFAP. These results show that maternal protein restriction induces adolescent offspring behaviors that resemble the main features associated with ASD and induce prolonged sickness behavior in adult male offspring.