Early life stress increases anxiety-like behavior in Balbc mice despite a compensatory increase in levels of postnatal maternal care

A better understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms by which early life stress (ELS) modifies brain development and adult behavior is necessary for diagnosing and treating psychopathology associated with exposure to ELS. For historical reasons, most of the work in rodents has been done in rats and attempts to establish robust and reproducible paradigms in the mouse have proven to be challenging. Here we show that under normal rearing conditions, increased levels of postnatal maternal care are associated with a decrease in anxiety-like behavior in BALB/cByj offspring. Brief daily pup-dam separation (BDS) during the postnatal period was associated with increased postnatal maternal care but was surprisingly associated with increased anxiety-like behavior in adult offspring, providing the first example in which offspring receiving higher levels of postnatal maternal care are more anxious in adulthood. Plasma corticosterone levels were elevated in BDS pups even 3 h after the pups were reunited with the dam, suggesting that this paradigm represents a form of early life stress. We also show that levels of total RNA and DNA in the hippocampus reach a peak at postnatal day 14 and that exposure to BDS seems to inhibit this developmental growth spurt. We propose that exposure to stress during the postnatal period overrides the ability of high levels of postnatal maternal care to program anxiety-like behavior by inhibiting the normal growth spurt that characterizes this period.