SynthesisPsychopharmacology2023
"The wrong tools for the right job": a critical meta-analysis of traditional tests to assess behavioural impacts of maternal separation.
Synthesis in Psychopharmacology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- The development of translational tasks for preclinical psychedelic research in psychiatry.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2026Review
- Review
- Dependence of psychopharmacological drug effects on early social stress experience: An analysis aligned with the research domain criteria framework.The Journal of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics · 2025Review
- Early Life Social Isolation Dysregulates Social Reward Processing, BDNF Signaling, and Intracellular Vesicular Sorting in the Nucleus Accumbens of Male and Female Rats.Journal of neurochemistry · 2025Article
- Extracellular Matrix Alterations Due to Early-Life Adversity: Implications for Auditory Learning in Male Sprague-Dawley Rats.Molecular neurobiology · 2025Article
- The pCREB/BDNF Pathway in the Hippocampus Is Involved in the Therapeutic Effect of Selective 5-HT Reuptake Inhibitors in Adult Male Rats Exposed to Blast Traumatic Brain Injury.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Sub-chronic stress exerts partially distinct behavioral and epigenetic effects in male and female mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Influence of Diet on Reproducible Corticosterone Levels in a Mouse Model of Maternal Separation with Early Weaning.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Long-term impacts of prenatal maternal immune activation and postnatal maternal separation on maternal behavior in adult female rats: Relevance to postpartum mental disorders.Behavioural brain research · 2024Article
- Effects of Maternal Separation on Effort-based Responding for Sucrose Are Associated with c-Fos Expression in the Nucleus Accumbens Core.Neuroscience · 2024Article
- GABAergic synapses from the ventral lateral septum to the paraventricular nucleus of hypothalamus modulate anxiety.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Sex-dependent effects of early life stress on reinforcement learning and limbic cortico-striatal functional connectivity.Neurobiology of stress · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
rationaleUnconditioned tasks in rodents have been the mainstay of behavioural assessment for decades, but their validity and sensitivity to detect the behavioural consequences of early life stress (ELS) remains contentious and highly variable.
objectivesIn the present study, we carried out a meta-analysis to investigate whether persistent behavioural effects, as assessed using unconditioned procedures in rats, are a reliable consequence of early repeated maternal separation, a commonly used procedure in rodents to study ELS.
methodsA literature search identified 100 studies involving maternally separated rats and the following unconditioned procedures: the elevated plus maze (EPM); open field test (OFT); sucrose preference test (SPT) and forced swim task (FST). Studies were included for analysis if the separation of offspring from the dam was at least 60 min every day during the pre-weaning period prior to the start of adolescence.
resultsOur findings show that unconditioned tasks are generally poor at consistently demonstrating differences between control and separated groups with pooled effect sizes that were either small or non-existent (EPM: Hedge's g = - 0.35, p = 0.01, OFT: Hedge's g = - 0.32, p = 0.05, SPT: Hedge's g = - 0.33, p = 0.21, FST: Hedge's g = 0.99, p = 0.0001). Despite considerable procedural variability between studies, heterogeneity statistics were low; indicating the lack of standardization in the maternal separation protocol was the not the cause of these inconsistent effects.
conclusionsOur findings indicate that in general, unconditioned tests of depression and anxiety are not sufficient to reveal the full behavioural repertoire of maternal separation stress should not be relied upon in isolation. We argue that more objective tasks that sensitively detect specific cognitive processes are better suited for translational research on stress-related disorders such as depression.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.