Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NYU Langone Health, New York, NY, 10016, USA.
Emotional Brain Institute, Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY, 10962, USA.
Nat Commun. 2020 Feb 28;11(1):1119. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-14801-3.
The roots of psychopathology frequently take shape during infancy in the context of parent-infant interactions and adversity. Yet, neurobiological mechanisms linking these processes during infancy remain elusive. Here, using responses to attachment figures among infants who experienced adversity as a benchmark, we assessed rat pup cortical local field potentials (LFPs) and behaviors exposed to adversity in response to maternal rough and nurturing handling by examining its impact on pup separation-reunion with the mother. We show that during adversity, pup cortical LFP dynamic range decreased during nurturing maternal behaviors, but was minimally impacted by rough handling. During reunion, adversity-experiencing pups showed aberrant interactions with mother and blunted cortical LFP. Blocking pup stress hormone during either adversity or reunion restored typical behavior, LFP power, and cross-frequency coupling. This translational approach suggests adversity-rearing produces a stress-induced aberrant neurobehavioral processing of the mother, which can be used as an early biomarker of later-life pathology.
心理病理学的根源通常在婴儿期于母婴互动和逆境的背景下形成。然而，将这些过程在婴儿期联系起来的神经生物学机制仍然难以捉摸。在这里，我们使用经历逆境的婴儿对依恋对象的反应作为基准，评估了大鼠幼崽的皮质局部场电位 (LFP) 和行为，方法是通过观察其对幼崽与母亲分离-团聚的影响，来检查其对逆境的反应。我们表明，在逆境中，幼崽的皮质 LFP 动态范围在接受母性抚爱时会减小，但在受到粗暴处理时影响最小。在团聚时，经历逆境的幼崽与母亲表现出异常的互动，皮质 LFP 也减弱。在逆境或团聚期间阻断幼崽的应激激素会恢复正常行为、LFP 功率和跨频耦合。这种转化方法表明，逆境养育会导致对母亲的应激诱导的异常神经行为处理，这可以作为后期生活病理的早期生物标志物。
