(C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Recent research has demonstrated that experiential/environmental factors in early life can program the adult stress response in rats, and Pitavastatin purchase this is manifest
as altered hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical activity and behavior in response to a stressor. Very little work has been devoted to investigating whether the environment during adolescence plays a similar rote in modulating ongoing developmental processes and how this might affect adult stress responding. Periadolescent predator odor (PPO) exposure was used here as a naturalistic model of repeated psychological stress. Behavioral and endocrine responses to PPO changed across the exposure period, and behavioral alterations persisted into adulthood. White adolescent rats showed pronounced avoidance responses upon initial PPO exposure, hyperactivity increased across the exposure period, especially in females. Corticosterone
(cort) responses to stressor exposure also changed in females, with higher physiological baseline levels observed at the end of the exposure period. In adulthood, relative to rats who had received a control manipulation during adolescence, PPO-exposed rats were more fearful in a novel open field and displayed altered responses to a predator odor stress test in adulthood. Moreover, lower levels of the D2 dopamine (DA) receptor were measured in prefrontal (infralimbic and dorsopeduncular) cortices of PPO-exposed rats. OSI-027 These Benzatropine findings suggest that the adolescent period may represent a sensitive period during which developmental programming of the stress response occurs. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Background India’s 2011 census revealed a growing imbalance between
the numbers of girls and boys aged 0-6 years, which we postulate is due to increased prenatal sex determination with subsequent selective abortion of female fetuses. We aimed to establish the trends in sex ratio by birth order from 1990 to 2005 with three nationally representative surveys and to quantify the totals of selective abortions of girls with census cohort data.
Methods We assessed sex ratios by birth order in 0.25 million births in three rounds of the nationally representative National Family Health Survey covering the period from 1990 to 2005. We estimated totals of selective abortion of girls by assessing the birth cohorts of children aged 0-6 years in the 1991,2001, and 2011 censuses. Our main statistic was the conditional sex ratio of second-order births after a firstborn girl and we used 3-year rolling weighted averages to test for trends, with differences between trends compared by linear regression.