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Early-life stress changes more genes in the brain than a head injury in rats
- everdrive 3y agoI don’t know that I would particularly expect a head injury to primarily change genes, but rather just to damage the structure of the brain itself. I don’t have any reason to doubt the study itself, but the article here is not very useful. Which genes are changed? Is it necessarily bad that genes are changed? Articles such as this are one of the reasons why people badly misunderstand (and overestimate) the effects of epigenetics.
- sys32768 3y agoI have never heard this either, and I spent a few years dealing with a TBI (traumatic brain injury) in a loved one. The finding that really surprised me is that whole brain atrophy is seen ~11 months after mild and moderate TBI: https://www.ajnr.org/content/23/9/1509 https://www.ajnr.org/content/23/9/1509
- gtirloni 3y agoOnly the headline is wrong, the article itself says something different. > stress changed the activation level of many more genes in the brain than were changed by a bump to the head. > "We found many, many, many more genes were differentially expressed as a result of our early life stress manipulation > First author Michaela Breach, a graduate student in Lenz's lab, examined the gene expression changes
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago> I don’t know that I would particularly expect a head injury to primarily change genes (...) It doesn't change genes, it changes gene expression. The headline is wrong. > "We found many, many, many more genes were differentially expressed as a result of our early life stress manipulation than our traumatic brain injury manipulation," Judging from the rest of the comments no one else read the link either.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoIn rats.
- kerowak 3y agoThis refrain is beginning to sound like the "checkmate atheists" of people who don't understand biology
- jackomelon 3y agoCan you elaborate?
- kerowak 3y agoPointing out that biologists use animal models that don't map perfectly to our biology is a lazy criticism. It's not a good-faith way of engaging with research, and demonstrates ignorance to the purpose of modelling in any field.
- stuckinhell 3y ago12 October 2023 - Reproducibility trial: 246 biologists get different results from same data sets https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03177-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03177-1 I think it's perfectly far to be very very critical of these paper especially because of the impact they can have on society, medicine, and legislation. We should be very harsh and disciplined.
- freedomben 3y agoGP isn't saying we shouldn't be critical, hard and disciplined. They are saying we shouldn't just lazily dismiss any results as "in rats." I fully agree with your comment out of context, and I think it actually backs up GP's point about not lazily dismissing stuff as "in rats"
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- nshunter 3y agoGabor Mate has published quite a few works on the effects of stress on children, even starting in utero with effects from the mother. Scattered minds and when the body says no connect to the effects of stress on the body and children in particular.
- rawgabbit 3y agoSorry I don’t understand. Stress had an effect or had no effect on children’s minds?
- greendesk 3y agoGabor Mate expresses that stress has an effect on children. The effect is expressed in actions as children grow into adulthood.
- ravishi 3y agoScattered Minds and When the Body Says No are book titles.
- graphe 3y agoChildren cope with their surroundings and if traumatized habituate themselves to these habits that are temporarily soothing but deleterious long term, often imitating family members who may have also carried these learned behaviors in their own life. Cycles of generations that are impoverished in comparison to their well to do neighbors are an example.
- 98codes 3y agoDr. Gabor Mate¹ should be taken with large grains of salt when it comes to ADHD and related conditions. There is a lack of published research or dedicated expertise on the matter; Dr. Russell Barkley, a leading ADHD expert and researcher², has a good video on the subject³. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabor_Mat%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabor_Mat%C3%A9 ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Barkley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Barkley ³ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO19LWJ0ZnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO19LWJ0ZnM
- robg 3y agoBe careful with this article, it’s based on a poster at a scientific meeting, not a peer reviewed publication.
- tokai 3y agoA poster at a conference stand a good chance to get more and better peer feedback than what is afforded to the peer review of the average journal paper.
- robg 3y agoPerhaps, but that feedback won’t be reflected in the poster itself, maybe the publication, if there is one.
- robwwilliams 3y agoHmm, not the case in my experience going to Society for Neuroscience for 25 years. If you are luck you get useful (non-critical) feedback from 5 people. Why would one “review” a poster seriously? They are often years away from submission even to bioRxiv. 3 cases id single-cell RNA-seq per group, all males. I hope you all appreciate the amazing noise level of single-cell RNAseq. This study should have used bulk RNAseq to keep noise lower.
- amelius 3y agoDoes amount of genes even say something?
- methodical 3y agoUh, yes. The difference between the human and chimp genomes is only like 1% but that minute variance clearly makes a massive difference. Different expressions of individual genes can vastly change appearance such as eye color, hair color, etc. These are physical traits but obviously, a similar concept applies to other traits.
- howmayiannoyyou 3y agoKey question: are the genetic changes passed on, or are the changes limited to expression rather than encoding?
- kyleyeats 3y agoGabor Mate has taken a close look at the epigenetics of trauma. He suggests it takes a few generations to clear up, but it's unclear if that's an epigenetic thing or just a re-traumatizing thing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lo_zamoyski 3y agoIt makes sense. Children takes cues about what's normal, what's rewarded, etc, from the behavioral patterns of their parents. If your parents are victims of bone fide trauma, the patterns will be different from what they would have been otherwise. So a trauma victim might display signs of hypervigilance, and children will observe this hypervigilance (in behavior, in the words used, in the attitudes adopted and result from it). So the child will be conditioned, but also, the child will likely infer the mental state of their parents to some degree. If you look hypervigilant, the child will infer "there must be danger". If maintained consistently enough, the inference is "the world is a highly dangerous place", blown out of proportion with the situation.
- RobotToaster 3y agoThe article doesn't say explicitly, but I assuming this is talking about epigenetics rather than mendelian mutations?
- photochemsyn 3y agoTitle should be "...changes gene expression levels" So they took a cohort of baby rats, exposed one group of rats to 'stress', smacked another group of rats in the head hard enough to cause brain injury, had a control group which was 'unstressed', then sliced up their brains to measure levels of protein expression. Some rats were not chopped up and their 'natural behavior' was monitored. This is apparently valuable research because it shows that traumatized and injured rats have different protein expression patterns in their brains from non-traumatized and injured rats and also behave differently as adults. This is applicable to humans because...??? Takeaways: (1) torturing rodents for dubious results is ethically questionable and (2) what a waste of money and resources.
- ramon156 3y agoIm glad this is brought up. This research feels like dots being vaguely connected together. What am I even supposed to do with this info?
- floor2 3y ago> What am I even supposed to do with this info? Seems like a weird question. Are you a researcher in a related field? Then maybe incorporate this finding into your models for how things work or tweak your future experiments based on this data. Are you an unaffiliated Rust developer? Then you're not really supposed to do anything with this.. it's not particularly for you. Read it if you're intellectually curious, to expand your knowledge and understanding of the world in general? Or ignore it if you don't care?
- krisoft 3y ago> This is applicable to humans because...??? We don't know if it is applicable to humans. Some of it might, some of it might not. First you figure out how rat brains work and then you can check if human brains work the same way. You are right that we are interested in human brains, and how to heal them. The reason we don't do these experiments on humans is mainly ethical. Simply put we value human lives more than rats. There are also logistical challenges with humans. They take too long to grow up and cost too much to raise. > torturing rodents for dubious results What makes the results dubious? I'm not an expert on brain research. Is it just that you have a dislike to animal analog studies? Is the gene expression changes caused by early-life stress and brain injury well understood enough that there are no open questions the experiment might answer?
- thang 3y agoOriginal article: https://news.osu.edu/early-life-stress-changes-more-genes-in-brain-than-a-head-injury/ https://news.osu.edu/early-life-stress-changes-more-genes-in...
- dontcontactme 3y agoIn rats, not humans. Interesting nonetheless
- blindriver 3y ago"Stress alone and stress combined with traumatic brain injury (TBI) produced a few noteworthy results. Both conditions activated pathways in excitatory and inhibitory neurons associated with plasticity, which is the brain's ability to adapt to all kinds of changes—mostly to promote flexibility, but sometimes, when the changes are maladaptive, resulting in negative outcomes. " It's weird that this study is interpreted as changes in gene activation is bad, when it's clearly mostly good. It's like saying that micro-tearing of muscles during exercise is bad, when in fact that's the process which builds more muscles. Sure, some tears of muscle are bad, but it's mostly good, and I assume that the changes in gene expression in the brain are a form of growing and reacting to new situations, not necessarily bad.
- sonofhans 3y agoThe two processes are not entirely analogous. They are both the result of the body reacting to external stress, and to become more fit for the environment that creates the stress. In the weightlifting example this is a positive change — the body gets stronger, as long as the exercise program is good. In the TBI and trauma cases, though, the external stresses are negative, not positive, thus the adaptations are negative as well. Teach a young brain that the world is stressful and scary and the brain will remember this, and act that way even when removed to a less scary world.
- blindriver 3y agoThe brain "remembering" has zero link with gene expression, which is what the entire article is about. In fact nothing you mention above responds to the question of gene expression. There's no evidence whatsoever that the change in behavior of an individual after stress is linked to differences in gene expression.
- InSteady 3y agoThat's quite the sweeping claim. Some quick googling suggests otherwise. "Chronic stress induces significant gene expression changes in the prefrontal cortex alongside alterations in adult hippocampal neurogenesis" >In this study, unpredictable chronic mild stress in mice resulted in a deficit in neuronal dendritic tree development and neuroblast migration in the hippocampal neurogenic niche. To investigate molecular pathways underlying neurogenesis alteration, genome-wide gene expression changes were assessed in the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and the hypothalamus alongside neurogenesis changes. Cluster analysis showed that the transcriptomic signature of chronic stress is much more prominent in the prefrontal cortex compared to the hippocampus and the hypothalamus. Pathway analyses suggested huntingtin, leptin, myelin regulatory factor, methyl-CpG binding protein and brain-derived neurotrophic factor as the top predicted upstream regulators of transcriptomic changes in the prefrontal cortex. Involvement of the satiety regulating pathways (leptin) was corroborated by behavioural data showing increased food reward motivation in stressed mice. Behavioural and gene expression data also suggested circadian rhythm disruption and activation of circadian clock genes such as Period 2. [1] https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/2/2/fcaa153/5912014 https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/2/2/fcaa153/5912...
- rednerrus 3y agoAll of the people who I know who are actual geniuses had early childhood trauma.
- eob 3y agoThe longitudinal studies of the of the kids who were 0-10 during the pandemic are going to be fascinating. As a tiny example: I've anecdotally heard that kids in the 5-10yo bracket need their parents in the bed to fall asleep at a higher rate than would typically be normal. Probably because parents cuddled their kids to sleep during the lockdowns as a stress reducer for both of them, rather than turning out the lights and leaving the room.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago> Probably because parents cuddled their kids to sleep during the lockdowns as a stress reducer for both of them, rather than turning out the lights and leaving the room. That's a good thing. Child has a need, Parent meets that need. That is a healthy relationship. But... the parent should have worked to ween the child from this behavior back to a normal sleeping situation.
- avgDev 3y agoFrom my reading it isn't really good or needed. Cuddling is great but child should learn to sleep on their own. A parent should not be meeting every want of a child.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HumblyTossed 3y agoFunny. You translated “need” to “want”. A parent should meet a child’s need. That is absolutely necessary for development. If a child is nervous and needs cuddling, do it.
- avgDev 3y agoFunny, how you are saying that somehow sleeping with your child is a need. It isn't.
- robwwilliams 3y agoNote to readers: Take this with a grain of salt. University PR team (and HN) should wait until this work is reviewed and published as a full length paper. This is an abstract that has not been reviewed—-a small study developing a rat two-hit model. All of the RNA work is based on three 21 day old males in the three groups. No information in abstract on the strain of rats (often outbred Sprague-Dawley). If this work interests you then you will find hundreds of studies on stress effects on hippocampus and many also on TBI effects on cortex and hippocampus.
- svnt 3y agoOther than the general shortcomings of a rat study, does this result run counter to your understanding of the effects of stress on genetic expression in the brain? My understanding is that early childhood stress in humans has also been fairly reliably linked to things such as “psychopathic” behaviors. e.g. [0] [0] https://www.academia.edu/download/89809148/2128.pdf https://www.academia.edu/download/89809148/2128.pdf
- robwwilliams 3y agoMost neuroscientists would expect TBI to be linked to regional micoglial activation. And perhaps activated GFAP-positive astrocytes. Psychosocial stress will have different effects mediated in part by the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal system. There may be some postmortem RNAseq studies of humans, even small pediatric cohort, but I did not find them in PubMed. I did find this treatment approach for TBI (yes, in mice) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33540074/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33540074/
- svnt 3y agoIsn’t it more that it is just extremely difficult if not impossible to do the necessary longitudinal study in humans? You’d need verified quantified early trauma, lack of possible TBI, and early death, and RNAseq processing postmortem which is a recent development. I think about it evolutionarily: if an animal was subject to significant early trauma (i.e. divergence from expected early environment), the most likely cause is early loss of a parent and no surrogate caretaker. This suggests a markedly different environment generally, and especially socially, and would warrant a significant behavior shift if it were evolutionarily possible to accomplish. It doesn’t seem so implausible to me.
- sethammons 3y agoRelated, you can read about nadine burke harris and adverse childhood experiences (ACE). Tl;dr: childhood mental trauma manifests in physical issues. For a solid intro, check out her ted talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_... Edit: ah, referenced in the article: https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/aces/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/aces/index.html
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- rawgabbit 3y agoThanks for the CDC link. What I got out of it is traumatized children when they become adults have an increased risk of depression and risky behavior. Is there any advantage for being depressed in a traumatic environment? I read one argument is that by shutting down higher order mental and physical processes, we can use the saved energy to heal? Does that hold any water?
- sethammons 3y agoIt is more profound than "increased risky behavior." https://onlinegrad.baylor.edu/resources/adverse-childhood-experiences-health/ https://onlinegrad.baylor.edu/resources/adverse-childhood-ex... Increases in autoimmune diseases, cancers, and even COPD controlled against smoking habits are observed. The body doesn't handle increased stress hormones well during childhood development.
- Modified3019 3y agoIf a child’s caretaker or environment are hostile, a reduction in the normal childhood activity that is likely to attract subsequent negative attention can be beneficial for survival to the extent it allows for possible reproduction. “The nail that sticks up gets hammered”. To be clear, this is typical evolutionary speculation. Sounds reasonable, but I’ve not seen anything that would be able to prove this and there are likely many other considerations that complicate such a nice and easy conclusion.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago>Researchers temporarily separated newborn rats... Not worth my click.
- wutwutwat 3y agoI swear I'm stating to experience increasing levels of the Mandela effect (might not be the proper explanation) over the last few years, because this is the first time I've ever heard of genes being a thing which could change. Granted, I'm not a biologist, but we have sayings like "good genes" or "it's in the genes", and I've heard countless medical explanations that things are passed down "in the genes". Aren't genes directly linked to one's dna, and not a thing that any physical trauma or stress can physically modify? Why does this seem like it directly clashes with my life long understanding of "genes"? I'm possibly going insane, because odd things like this keep popping up and are a bit troubling in some odd dejavu kind of way
- donkers 3y agoIf you had read the article you'd understand that it's talking about changes in gene expression, not changing of genes entirely.
- wutwutwat 3y agoMy question still remains. Even if the gene isn't altered, but the expression is, which I assume is the important part in determining outward influence the gene has, I wasn't aware anything short of radiation could alter that. If stress can change you at the gene level, or metal state in general, wouldn't we all be able to "fix ourselves" or otherwise change our gene expressions by submitting ourselves to various metal states to invoke the wanted gene response? TL;DR, I wasn't aware anything regarding genes could change, that's all, and I'm more curious why I keep discovering so many large gaps in things I personally considered life long, common knowledge. My question was almost rhetorical for myself.
- upsidesinclude 3y agoAppropriate username
- svnt 3y agoEpigenetics is the catch-all term. “Evolution in Four Dimensions” is an interesting if slightly dated book going into many of the ways that the expression of your genetic material can chance who you are.
- ulrischa 3y agoKids have a lot of stress today. It often starts in the kindergarten. I wonder what covid induced Stress for kids will have in the future.
- totallywrong 3y agoI can't imagine my childhood with the pressure to maintain an idyllic image on social networks which seems to be the number one priority of kids today.
- INTPenis 3y agoEver since I heard someone describe ADD as your "fight or flight response going haywire", I've realized that a lot of people in my life with true ADD have experienced trauma in their childhood. But I'm no doctor, just making observations and trying to understand the world.
- esafak 3y agoAnybody got references for this?
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoI am fairly certain that for many people, adhd is their brain being on constant alert / hyper-vigilance due to instability and trauma growing up, and needing to become very sensitive to people's behaviours to anticipate bad responses. Yes, I am speaking from experience.
- saltcured 3y agoIsn't this what the PTSD label is for? Or is the implication that this another "spectrum" where we've historically had some discrete labels?
- INTPenis 3y agoI guess the implication is that ADD is what PTSD in children could evolve into.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoNot necessarily; i was thinking more about hyper-vigilance. It doesn’t necessarily have all the issues of PTSD.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- scohesc 3y agoI agree with your statement - I know it's anecdotal, etc. etc. but it seems to have some credibility to it given my upbringing and my experiences. You don't learn executive functioning skills when the opposite is modeled by your parents. You also don't learn them from other people in your community when you're focused on trying to survive day to day and constantly dread going home to an environment where you're not respected. Every day is a struggle but I feel I'm starting to come around and realize that I can change myself for the better. I hope everyone else experiencing the same can come to this realization too.
- hereme888 3y agoWhy would a physical injury change much in terms of genes to begin with?
- dsco 3y agoAs someone who both experienced childhood trauma (refuged to another continent at the age of 4) and has received a fair share of blows to the head (many years in martial arts) - this does kind of resonate. Mood disorders and ADHD like symptoms are things I've dealt with but which I'm learning to control with age. It did take several decades and much introspection to introduce some sort of self-control and awareness about when I'm acting irrational though.
- elvis10ten 3y agoOff: Did you stop martial arts? If no, How did you cope/manage? Just curious.
- tambourine_man 3y agoNeither can change the genes, the headline is wrong, probably intentionally to generate clicks.
- graphe 3y agoGenes are made of DNA which degrades and does change. The mRNA vaccine and viruses also change your DNA. It won't change your gender or race but it will affect you mentally and your phenotype. Cancer is another way genes can change.
- vjk800 3y ago...in rats.
- thenerdhead 3y agowe typically use rats for stress tests. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5915631/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5915631/
- poulsbohemian 3y agoI'm convinced that stress is the single biggest factor in aging and overall health. Look at the careers of people who live to 100+ -- they almost always worked in something where they weren't dealing with a lot of trauma and high stakes. You read this blue zones stuff and at the center of all of it is low-stress. Not necessarily "leisure," but activities that are intended to be calming and thoughtful - exercise baked into the day, shared meals prepared at home, community interaction.
- thenerdhead 3y agoSapolsky has been at this for many years. Here's a great talk on one of his older books. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9H9qTdserM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9H9qTdserM Especially with regards to his commentary on Selye's theories/lab work with rats. Makes sense if you've read a good number of books on stress (i.e. Stress of Life, Sapolsky's work, etc)