Chronic psychosocial stress in the absence of social support induces pathological pre-pulse inhibition in mice

Chronic psychosocial stress has been suggested as “second hit” in the etiology of neuropsychiatric disease, but experimental evidence is scarce. We employed repetitive social defeat stress in juvenile mice, housed individually or in groups, and measured sensorimotor gating by pre-pulse inhibition (PPI), a marker of neuronal network function. Using the resident-intruder paradigm, 28-day old C57BL/6NCrl mice were subjected daily for 3 weeks to social defeat. PPI and basic behaviour were analyzed 10 weeks later. Whereas stress increased the level of anxiety in all animals, persistent PPI deficits were found only in individually housed mice. Thus, social support in situations of severe psychosocial stress may prevent lasting impairment in basic information processing.