Meeting Abstract

S9.7  Tuesday, Jan. 6  Early life environment influences on neuroimmune interactions and behavior in adulthood. BILBO, S.D.; Duke University staci.bilbo@duke.edu

Events within the perinatal environment have significant consequences for the development and function of physiological systems throughout life, a phenomenon termed perinatal programming. For instance, early life exposure to infectious agents influences reactivity to stress, immune regulation, and susceptibility to disease in adulthood. We have demonstrated that rats infected neonatally with live E. coli exhibit markedly altered fever, cytokine expression, and brain inflammatory markers following a simulated immune challenge (e.g., lipopolysaccharide, LPS) in adulthood. Notably, these animals also exhibit profound behavioral changes: memory is significantly impaired in neonatally-infected rats that receive a challenge of LPS around the time of learning, and this is causally-linked to exaggerated pro-inflammatory cytokine production. In contrast to these deficits however, neonatally-infected rats are remarkably protected from stressor-induced changes in depressive-like behavior and recover from peripheral inflammation more quickly than controls. These data suggest that early-life infection should be considered within a cost/benefit perspective, in which outcomes in adulthood may be differentially protected or impaired. This talk will address two related questions: 1) what changes occur in the neonatal brain in response to the infection that render the brain vulnerable versus resistant to a later challenge? and 2) what are the long-term consequences for host morbidity and mortality?