Comparison Of Testosterone Levels In Chronic Alternating Stress Model Of Wistar Albino Rats And Their Offspring
Muhammad Omar Malik
Robina Usman
Syed Hamid Habib
Umar Saddique Khattak
Abstract
Background: Stress has become a part of our everyday life. Stress has an adverse effect on all systems of the body including the reproductive system. The percentage of infertility is increasing day by day which can be due to stress in the reproductive years which are also the career-building years of young couples. With the passage of time stress has increased due to a more competitive lifestyle. This project was designed to study the transgenerational effect of stress. How do the offsprings of parents exposed to stress react to stress when they grow up? This study was carried out on rats because they get mature and reproduce much more quickly.
Objective: To find the effect of chronic alternating stress on parents and then study the effect of the same stress on their offspring by comparison of
- ACTH,
- Corticosterone,
- Testosterone.
Methods: This was an experimental case-control study. We took 130 healthy wistar albino rats. They were 11 weeks old and we assayed them at the start of the experiment. Then we divided them into two groups. The case parents and the control parents. To the case parents we gave 3 weeks of chronic alternating stress and to the controls we did not give any stress. The genders were kept separate before and during the stress period after which they were allowed to mate. The offsprings of case and control parents were divided into groups. One group was given early life stress starting at 5 weeks and ending at 8 weeks. One group was given late-life stress starting at 11 weeks and ending at 14 weeks. One group received both early and late life stress. Then there were controls that did not receive any stress but belonged to the same group of parents. The protocol of chronic alternating stress was the same as that of the parents.
Results: The early life stressed rats had increased Corticosterone levels (P£ 0.05) while testosterone (P £ 0.05) was decreased in early life stressed rats as compared to the late life stressed rats. ACTH was increased in the late life stressed rats (P£ 0.05).
Conclusion: The rats given both early and late life stress fared better than the rats given only early life stress.