Effects of perinatal undernutrition on juvenile play development of rats

In rats, juvenile play is an innate behavior that improves motor skills, builds social ranking, and provides basic learning experiences for survival. Juvenile play is also a complex process in which the animals are exposed to multisensory signals and environmental stressors, including maternal separation and perinatal food re-striction. Perinatal malnutrition or undernutrition impedes brain growth and functions by decreasing neurogen-esis, myelination, and the number of dendritic and synaptic contacts at different cortical and subcortical brain areas subserving juvenile play combinations. In this review we examined, in the rat, the impact of experimental models of perinatal food restriction, and how disordered sensory activities at different brain levels may disrupt the transmission, encoding and integration of the neuronal activity underlying the complex expression of ju-venile play. Moreover, current findings may be relevant to understand how the sensory impairments provoked by perinatal undernutrition and its associated stressors may alter the mechanisms involved in motor skill de-velopment, early-life experiences and cognition as observed in youth and adulthood.