Chronic cortisol exposure in early development leads to neuroendocrine dysregulation in adulthood

Objective Chronic early life stress can affect development of the neuroendocrine stress system, leading to its persistent dysregulation and consequently increased disease risk in adulthood. One contributing factor is thought to be epigenetic programming in response to chronic cortisol exposure during early development. We have previously shown that zebrafish embryos treated chronically with cortisol develop into adults with constitutively elevated whole body cortisol and aberrant immune gene expression. The objective of the experiments reported here was to further characterize the phenotype of those adults. Results We find that adult zebrafish derived from cortisol-treated embryos have aberrant cortisol levels, tissue distribution, and dynamics, which correlate with differential activity of key glucocorticoid-responsive regulatory genes klf9 and fkbp5 in blood and brain.