Prenatal Excess Glucocorticoid Exposure and Adult Affective Disorders: A Role for Serotonergic and Catecholamine Pathways

that inactivates glucocorticoids, increases anxiety- and de-pressive-like behaviour in mice; however, in this case the phenotype is not accompanied by overt perturbation in the HPA axis but, intriguingly, alterations in serotonergic and catecholamine pathways are maintained in this program-ming model. This review addresses one of the potential ad-verse effects of glucocorticoid overexposure in utero, i.e. in-creased incidence of affective behaviours, and the mecha-nisms underlying these behaviours including alteration of the HPA axis and serotonergic and catecholamine pathways. Copyright © 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel Developmental Programming Low birth weight and other indicators of reduced fetal growth are associated with adult cardio-metabolic and psychiatric diseases. This association is the result of ‘de-velopmental programming’, whereby a stimulus during a sensitive period of early development exerts permanent effects on structure, physiology or metabolism [1]. The environmental mechanisms of developmental program-ming identified so far can be simplified into two major groups: fetal stress exposure and maternal nutrition, al-though changes in glucocorticoids appear to underpi