Using a Murine Model of Psychosocial Stress in Pregnancy as a Translationally Relevant Paradigm for Psychiatric Disorders in Mothers and Infants

Our protocol is significant because it represents a new paradigm for evaluating the effects of chronic stress, specifically psychosocial stress, on pregnancy outcomes. In this protocol, we expose pregnant mice to various psychosocial insults of different intensities in an unpredictable fashion. Previous animal model paradigms employed physical stressors or a limited number of stressors administered repetitively, which does not reflect the experience of women during pregnancy.

Our chronic psychosocial stress model overcomes these limitations. This method has wide ramifications for various research areas, including maternal mental health and adverse infant development-related research, and more broadly, for understanding the developmental origins of adult disease through adverse intrauterine events. Before starting each stressor in the CGS paradigm, bring the CGS group mice from the housing room into the room designated for CGS.