Objective-We investigated effects of three weekly courses of fetal betamethasone (βM) exposure on motivation and cognition in juvenile baboon offspring utilizing the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery.Study design-Pregnant baboons (Papio sp.) received two injections of saline control (C) or 175 μg/kg βM 24h apart at 0.6, 0.65 and 0.7 gestation. Offspring [Female (FC), n = 7 and Male (MC), n = 6; Female (FβM), n = 7 and Male (MβM), n = 5] were studied at 2.6-3.2 years with a progressive ratio test for motivation, simple discriminations (SD) and reversals (SR) for associative learning and rule change plasticity, and an intra-dimensional/extra-dimensional (IDED) set-shifting test for attention allocation. Conclusion-This central nervous system developmental programming adds growing concerns of long-term effects of repeated fetal synthetic glucocorticoid exposure. In summary, behavioral effects observed show sex specific differences in resilience to multiple fetal βM exposures.
Results-βM