The events before birth can have a significant impact on our development and life. Prenatal maternal stress of an embryo resulting from the stress of a pregnant mother may indicate an excess or shortage of the expected trigger during the fetal programming period. This leads to aberrations, such as changes in the nervous and endocrine systems, that also exist in adulthood. The aim of the study was to investigate the transgenerational effect of mild and severe prenatal stress on anxiety-like behaviour in offspring of animals who were prenatally stressed and expression of genes for AR, GnRH, and BDNF in the brain of prenatally stressed animals. Adult male mice were used as the model. Anxiety-like behaviour was investigated by two behavioral tests, the elevated plus-maze test, and light-dark box test, and gene expression in the brain was evaluated by immunohistochemical staining. We did not detect anxiety-like behaviour in offspring of prenatal stressed animals regardless of intensity, suggesting that the effects of prenatal stress on anxiety-like behaviour are not transmitted from generation to generation. We did not detect changes in GnRH and BDNF expression, whereas we found that, regardless of intensity, prenatal stress had an effect on reducing the expression of AR in the ventromedial nucleus of the brain. Based on our results, we did not detect any specific effects of prenatal stress on the parameters studied, with the exception of influencing the expression of AR, which plays an important developmental role in sexual differentiation. The role of AR in behaviours like reproductive and aggressive behaviours is not well defined, but it is well known that activities of the HPG and HPA axes may affect each other at the level of AR. For this reason, further research on AR would be interesting.
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