Dietary choline during periadolescence attenuates cognitive damage caused by neonatal maternal separation in male rats

Abstract

Objectives: Choline (Ch) is an essential nutrient that acts as a cognitive facilitator when administered during perinatal periods, and it has been recognised as a ‘pharmacological’ agent that can ease cognitive dysfunctions provoked by exposure to damaging stimuli during early developmental stages. The aim of the present work is to determine whether providing a diet rich in Ch would reduce the severity of the memory deficit provoked by a neonatal stress episode in male adult rats.

Methods: The effect of Ch on memory was measured using memory tasks such as object and place recognition. Ontogenetic manipulations were conducted during two sensitive developmental periods. During the first post-natal (PN) 14 days, only the male rat pups were selected and half of them were separated from the mother, group maternal separation (MS). Subsequently, during periadolescence (PN 21–60), the rats were exposed to a deficient (DEF = 0 g/kg Ch chloride), sufficient (CON = 1.1 g/kg Ch chloride), or supplemented (SUP = 5 g/kg Ch chloride) diets for this nutrient.

Results: The results indicated that for group MS, only rats fed with the SUP diet were able to recognise the familiar object and place that had been experienced 24 hours before, unlike groups DEF and CON. In addition, whereas rats in the non-separated group (No-MS) recognised the object independently of the diet, only rats that received a DEF diet failed to recognise the place, showing that a Ch deficit affects spatial memory tasks.

Discussion: These results show that Ch supplementation during periadolescence can attenuate the memory deficit provoked by extended neonatal stress.

Keywords:

• Choline
• Acetylcholine
• Recognition memory
• Early development
• Neonatal stress

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Michelle Symonds for their review of this manuscript.

Disclaimer statement

Contributors All authors contributed equally.

Funding This work was supported by grant from MINECO (Spain) PSI2012-31641.

Conflits of interest The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

Ethics approval he procedures were approved by the Ethics Committee from the University of Granada for Animal research according to the European Council directive 86/609/EEC.