Deficient maternal care resulting from immunological stress during pregnancy is associated with a sex-dependent enhancement of conditioned fear in the offspring

Table 3 Summary of the effects of the prenatal and postnatal maternal manipulations on the offspring’s performance in the elevated plus maze and open field exploration tests in adulthood

Experiment	Experimental groups (prenatal treatment–postnatal rearing)
Experiment	SAL-SAL	SAL-POL	POL-SAL	POL-POL
Elevated plus maze
Total distance moved (m)	9.56 ± 0.56	10.48 ± 0.57	11.34 ± 0.64	10.85 ± 0.51
Distance moved (m) in open arms	1.57 ± 0.46	1.25 ± 0.22	1.40 ± 0.37	1.16 ± 0.29
Percent open arm entries	32.63 ± 4.53	31.39 ± 3.96	28.83 ± 3.35	31.57 ± 3.86
Percent time spent in open arms	27.79 ± 5.10	20.76 ± 3.55	18.78 ± 3.02	17.52 ± 2.98
Open field
Total distance moved (m)	123.71 ± 3.95	119.25 ± 8.05	112.55 ± 12.42	135.54 ± 9.86
Distance moved (m) in center zone	7.27 ± 0.78	7.56 ± 1.25	8.50 ± 2.18	8.62 ± 1.48
Time in center zone (s)	137.72 ± 21.29	116.92 ± 19.88	163.40 ± 57.76	175.94 ± 32.36
Center zone entries	68 ± 7	67 ± 11	77 ± 19	84 ± 13

SAL-SAL, offspring subjected to prenatal vehicle exposure and raised by vehicle-treated surrogate mothers; SAL-POL, offspring subjected to prenatal vehicle exposure and raised by PolyI:C-treated surrogate mothers; POL-SAL, offspring subjected to prenatal PolyI:C exposure and raised by vehicle-treated surrogate mothers; POL-POL, offspring subjected to prenatal PolyI:C exposure and raised by PolyI:C-treated surrogate mothers. No significant group differences were detected in any of the dependent measures. All values are means ± SEM

ISSN: 1866-1955