Abstract
Exposure of rodents to early-life stress has been shown to affect emotional behavior in adulthood, suggesting a significant impact of stress on brain development. There is a hypothesis that the developing central nervous system is more sensitive to stress than the adult. To test this hypothesis, we compared long-lasting effects of systemic corticosterone (CORT) administrations in mice of an early developmental period. Mice exposed to early-neonatal CORT treatment on postnatal days (PD) 2-4 displayed impaired extinction of contextually conditioned fear memory, an amygdala-related behavior. These results suggest age-dependent consequences of neonatal CORT exposure in amygdala neurons and provide evidence for a detrimental influence of early-neonatal stress on adolescent fear-memory processing.
