Adverse Behavioral Changes in Adult Mice Following Neonatal Repeated Exposure to Pain and Sucrose
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sucrose is recommended for the treatment of pain during minor procedures in preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and is currently used worldwide as the standard care. We recently reported that adult mice repetitively exposed to sucrose compared to water during the first week of life, irrespective of exposure to an intervention, had significantly smaller brain volumes in large white matter, cortical and subcortical structures (e.g. hippocampus, striatum, fimbria). These structures are important for stress regulation and memory formation. Here we report the effects of repeated neonatal exposure to pain and sucrose on adult behavior in mice. Neonatal C57BL/6J mice (N=160, 47% male) were randomly assigned to one of 2 treatments (sucrose, water) and one of 3 interventions (needle-prick, touch, handling). Pups received 10 interventions daily from postnatal day 1 (P1) to P6. A single dose of 24% sucrose or water was given orally 2 min before each intervention. At adulthood (P65-85) mice underwent behavioral testing to assess memory, anxiety, motor/learning, pain sensitivity, and sugar preference. We found that mice that had received sucrose and handling only, had poorer short-term memory in adulthood compared to controls (p<0.05). When exposed to pain, mice treated with repetitive sucrose or water did not differ on memory performance (p=0.1). A sugar preference test showed that adult mice that received sucrose before an intervention as pups consumed less sugar solution compared to controls or those that received water before pain (p<0.05). There were no significant group differences in anxiety, motor or pain sensitivity. In a mouse model that closely mimics NICU care, we show for the first time that memory in adulthood was poorer for mice exposed to pain during the first week of life, irrespective of sucrose treatment, suggesting that sucrose does not protect memory performance when administered for pain. In the absence of pain, early repetitive sucrose exposure induced poorer short-term memory, highlighting the importance of accurate pain assessment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".