al. (2013) reported long-term increases in expression of DNMT1 and MeCP2 in the hypothalamus of PAE adult rats. Another study reported decreased MeCP2 expression in the prefrontal cortex and striatum of rodents, which correlated with behavioral abnormalities associated with cortical and striatal dysfunction (Kim et al., 2013). Increased DNMT activity was also reported in the postnatal day (PD) 21 rat hippocampus following perinatal alcohol exposure (Perkins et al., 2013). This study intubated the dam and pups across all three trimesters of development and the intubated control group showed many of the same gene expression changes that were observed in the alcohol-exposed group, making it difficult to parse out the effect of alcohol alone vs. stress caused by the intubation procedure. Intubation stress can be a significant confound in developmental alcohol studies (Boschen et al., 2015), highlighting the need to systematically study the unique and overlapping contributions of stress and alcohol on experimental outcomes.
