Perinatal Anoxia Degrades Auditory System Function in Rats

Little is known about the neural bases of the reduced auditory and cortical processing speeds that have been recorded in language-impaired, autistic, schizophrenic, and other disabled human populations. Although there is strong evidence for genetic contributions to etiologies, epigenetic factors suc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2005-12, Vol.102 (52), p.19156-19161
Main Authors: F. Strata, A. R. Delpolyi, B. H. Bonham, E. F. Chang, R. C. Liu, H. Nakahara, Merzenich, M. M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic data
Acoustic Stimulation
Animal behavior
Animals
Animals, Newborn
Anoxia
Auditory cortex
Auditory Cortex - pathology
Auditory Pathways
Auditory Perception - physiology
Auditory system
Autism
Autistic disorder
Behavior, Animal
Behavioral neuroscience
Biological Sciences
Brain stem
Cerebral Cortex - pathology
Ears & hearing
Electroencephalography
Evoked Potentials, Auditory
Evoked Potentials, Auditory, Brain Stem
Hearing
Hypoxia
Inferior colliculus
Language acquisition
Neurology
Neurons
Noise
Protein Structure, Tertiary
Pups
Rats
Rodents
Signal Transduction
Time Factors
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Summary:Little is known about the neural bases of the reduced auditory and cortical processing speeds that have been recorded in language-impaired, autistic, schizophrenic, and other disabled human populations. Although there is strong evidence for genetic contributions to etiologies, epigenetic factors such as perinatal anoxia (PA) have been argued to be contributors, or causal, in a significant proportion of cases. In this article, we explored the consequences of PA on this elementary aspect of auditory behavior and on auditory system function in rats that were briefly perinatally anoxic. PA rats had increased acoustic thresholds and reduced processing efficiencies recorded in an auditory behavioral task. These rats had modestly increased interpeak intervals in their auditory brainstem responses, and substantially longer latencies in poststimulus time histogram responses recorded in the primary auditory cortex. The latter were associated with degraded primary auditory cortex receptive fields and a disrupted tonotopy. These processing deficits are consistent with the parallel behavioral and physiological deficits recorded in children and adults with a history of language-learning impairment and autism.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.0509520102