“…A common occurrence during the perinatal period is exposure to infection, which activates the host immune response. Early life immune activation is known to impact normal development in both animals and humans resulting in long-term metabolic (Dimock et al, 2011;Walker et al, 2006), immune (Galic et al, 2009;Hodgson et al, 2001;Martinez et al, 1998;Walker et al, 2010), neuroendocrine (Matthews, 2002;Shanks et al, 2000) and behavioural (Meyer et al, 2006;Walker et al, 2009b) alterations. Sexual dimorphism in response to a neonatal immune challenge has also been recently shown to predict differences in adult immune and behavioural responses to inflammation .…”