Transient food insecurity during the juvenile-adolescent period affects adult weight, cognitive flexibility, and dopamine neurobiology.

ABSTRACT: A major challenge for neuroscience, public health, and evolutionary biology is to understand the effects of scarcity and uncertainty on the developing brain. Currently, a significant fraction of children and adolescents worldwide experience insecure access to food. The goal of our work was to test in mice whether the transient experience of insecure versus secure access to food during the juvenile-adolescent period produced lasting differences in learning, decision-making, and the dopamine system in adulthood. We manipulated feeding schedules in mice from postnatal day (P)21 to P40 as food insecure or ad libitum and found that when tested in adulthood (after P60), males with different developmental feeding history showed significant differences in multiple metrics of cognitive flexibility

SUBMITTER: Lin WC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10519557 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature