Early life stress (ELS) yields cognitive impairments of unknown molecular and physiological origin. We found that fragmented maternal care of mice during a neonatal critical period from postnatal days P2–9 elevated dopamine receptor D2R and suppressed D4R expression, specifically within the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in only the male offspring. This was associated with poor performance on a two-choice visual attention task, which was acutely rescued in adulthood by local or systemic pharmacological rebalancing of D2R/D4R activity. Furthermore, ELS male mice demonstrated heightened hypothalamic orexin and persistently disrupted sleep. Given that acute sleep deprivation in normally reared male mice mimicked the ACC dopamine receptor subtype modulation and disrupted attention of ELS mice, sleep loss likely underlies cognitive deficits in ELS mice. Likewise, sleep impairment mediated the attention deficits associated with early adversity in human children, as demonstrated by path analysis on data collected with multiple questionnaires for a large child cohort. A deeper understanding of the sex-specific cognitive consequences of ELS thus has the potential to reveal therapeutic strategies for overcoming them.

中文翻译：

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雄性小鼠睡眠敏感的多巴胺受体表达是早期逆境关键期后注意力缺陷的基础


早期生活压力 （ELS） 会导致未知的分子和生理来源的认知障碍。我们发现，在出生后 P2-9 的新生儿关键期，小鼠的碎片化母体护理提高了多巴胺受体 D2R 并抑制了 D4R 表达，特别是在雄性后代的前扣带皮层 （ACC） 内。这与在两项选择视觉注意力任务中的表现不佳有关，该任务在成年后通过 D2R/D4R 活性的局部或全身药理学再平衡被急性挽救。此外，ELS 雄性小鼠表现出下丘脑食欲素升高和持续睡眠中断。鉴于正常饲养的雄性小鼠的急性睡眠剥夺模拟了 ACC 多巴胺受体亚型调节并扰乱了 ELS 小鼠的注意力，睡眠不足可能是 ELS 小鼠认知缺陷的基础。同样，睡眠障碍介导了人类儿童与早期逆境相关的注意力缺陷，正如对大型儿童队列的多份问卷收集的数据的路径分析所证明的那样。因此，更深入地了解 ELS 的性别特异性认知后果有可能揭示克服这些后果的治疗策略。