Pulmonary and systemic vascular dysfunction in young offspring of mothers with preeclampsia

Adverse events in utero may predispose to cardiovascular disease in adulthood. The underlying mechanisms are unknown. During preeclampsia, vasculotoxic factors are released into the maternal circulation by the diseased placenta. We speculated that these factors pass the placental barrier and leave a defect in the circulation of the offspring that predisposes to a pathological response later in life. The hypoxia associated with high-altitude exposure is expected to facilitate the detection of this problem.

Effect of sibling competition and male carotenoid supply on offspring condition and oxidative stress

Early developmental conditions have major implications for an individual's fitness. In species where offspring are born simultaneously, the level of sibling competition for food access is intense. In birds, high sibling competition may subject nestlings to decreased growth rate as a result of limited food and increased levels of oxidative stress through high metabolic activity induced by begging behaviors. We manipulated the level of sibling competition in a natural population of great tits and assessed the consequences for nestling body condition and resistance to oxidative stress. In a full factorial design, we both augmented brood size to increase sibling competition and supplemented the male parents with physiological doses of carotenoids thereby doubling the natural carotenoid intake, aiming at increasing the males' investment in current reproduction and thereby decreasing sibling competition. Nestling body mass was reduced by the brood enlargement and enhanced by the carotenoid supplementation of fathers. Nestling resistance to oxidative stress, measured as total antioxidant defenses in whole blood, was not influenced by the treatments. Because nestlings experience high metabolic activities, an absence of an effect of sibling competition on free radicals production seems unlikely. Nestling body mass decreased and resistance to oxidative stress tended to increase with initial brood size, and hence these correlational effects suggest a trade-off between morphological growth and development of the antioxidant system. However, the result of the experimental treatment did not support this trade-off hypothesis. Alternatively, it suggests that nestling developed compensatory mechanisms that were not detected by our antioxidant capacity measure.

Effect of preventive interventions in mentally ill parents on the mental health of the offspring: systematic review and meta-analysis

Mental illness in parents affects the mental health of their children. A systematic review and a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of interventions to prevent mental disorders or psychological symptoms in the offspring were performed.

Do Zebra Finch Parents Fail to Recognise Their Own Offspring?

Individual recognition systems require the sender to be individually distinctive and the receiver to be able to perceive differences between individuals and react accordingly. Many studies have demonstrated that acoustic signals of almost any species contain individualized information. However, fewer studies have tested experimentally if those signals are used for individual recognition by potential receivers. While laboratory studies using zebra finches have shown that fledglings recognize their parents by their “distance call”, mutual recognition using the same call type has not been demonstrated yet. In a laboratory study with zebra finches, we first quantified between-individual acoustic variation in distance calls of fledglings. In a second step, we tested recognition of fledgling calls by parents using playback experiments. With a discriminant function analysis, we show that individuals are highly distinctive and most measured parameters show very high potential to encode for individuality. The response pattern of zebra finch parents shows that they do react to calls of fledglings, however they do not distinguish between own and unfamiliar offspring, despite individual distinctiveness. This finding is interesting in light of the observation of a high percentage of misdirected feedings in our communal breeding aviaries. Our results demonstrate the importance of adopting a receiver's perspective and suggest that variation in fledgling contact calls might not be used in individual recognition of offspring.