Hippocampus

Are there sex differences in the structure of the hippocampus?

• Answer--yes! There is evidence for a complex interaction between early experience (rearing), dendritic morphology and sex of individual (rats).

  • animals raised in an enriched environment possess neurons that are more complex than animals raised under normal laboratory conditions; an enriched environment involves the presence of other animals and various objects to interact with, while normal laboratory conditions are more plain and animals may be housed alone or in small groups with no objects to play with
  • if you compare males and females housed in the complex environment to rats housed under normal laboratory conditions, you can see several differences:
  • in the apical dendritic tree of CA3 neurons, females housed in the enriched environment have more dendrites concentrated proximal (close) to the cell body, while males in the enriched environment had more dendrites concentrated distal (far) from cell body
  • in the dentate gyrus, females housed in enriched environments had granule cells with an increase in dendritic length while males in a similar environment did not show this change

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