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Maternal deprivation and milk replacement affect the integrity of gray and white matter in the developing lamb brain
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International audience. The psychoendocrine evaluation of lamb development has demonstrated that mater-nal deprivation and milk replacement alters health, behavior, and endocrine pro-files. While lambs are able to discriminate familiar and non-familiar conspecifics(mother or lamb), only lambs reared with their mother develop such clear social dis-crimination or preference. Lambs reared without mother display no preference for aspecific lamb from its own group. Differences in exploratory and emotional behav-iors between mother-reared and mother-deprived lambs have also been reported.As these behavioural abilities are supported by the brain, we hypothesize that rear-ing with maternal deprivation and milk replacement leads to altered brain develop-ment and maturation. To test this hypothesis, we examined brain morphometric andmicrostructural variables extracted from in vivo T1-weighted and diffusion-weightedmagnetic resonance images acquired longitudinally (1 week, 1.5 months, and 4.5months of age) in mother-reared and mother-deprived lambs. From the morphometricvariables the caudate nuclei volume was found to be smaller for mother-deprived thanfor mother-reared lambs. T1-weighted signal intensity and radial diffusivity werehigher for mother-deprived than for mother-reared lambs in both the white and graymatters. The fractional anisotropy of the white matter was lower for mother-deprivedthan for mother-reared lambs. Based on these morphometric and microstructuralcharacteristics we conclude that maternal deprivation delays and affects lamb braingrowth and maturation.
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