It is known that chronic gestational stress alters the pulmonary immune response predisposing to chronic pulmonary pathologies such as asthma, which occur with morphological alterations in both conduction and exchange airways. However, it is still unknown whether chronic gestational stress generates alterations in pulmonary morphology, specifically in the airway conduction, which predisposes to hyperreactivity or other alterations of the airway, in early postnatal stages. The aim of this work was to analyze the effects of prenatal stress on the development of pulmonary conduction airway. Eight pregnant females were randomly assigned to one control group and one group submitted to restriction of movement during the last gestational week. The offspring were sacrificed on postnatal days 0 (P0) and 14 (P14), extracting the lung to conduct a histomorphological analysis of the conduction airway. In P0 an increase in the peribronchiolar smooth muscle in stressed males was observed in the conduction airway in comparison to the control (p = 0.0002); no significant differences were observed in the female or in the P14 stage. Prenatal stress produces histomorphologic changes in the conduction airway in the offspring at early postnatal stages.
KEY WORDS: Prenatal stress; Lung; Morphology.
