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Early-life stress leaves a 'scar' inside brain cells in mice
- redrix 2mo agoI remember having it drilled into me in High School that unless you did well on your finals: 1. You wouldn’t get the score you needed to get into a good University and/or accepted into the course you wanted. 2. If you didn’t get into that course, you wouldn’t be able to do <x> for a career. 3. If you DID get into the course you wanted, it needed to be at a top University (which of course required an even higher entry score) or else you’d find it hard to get a job afterwards. Imagine all of that stress: Telling 16-18 year olds that unless you ace your tests, you won’t be able to do what you want to in life.
- NewJazz 2mo agoI remember having it drilled into me in high school that I was procrastinating school work while at my mom's to avoid spending time with my dad and I was faking my sobbing for sympathy and I was a horrible person who was lucky to have a dad as good as I had and how I keep doing the same things wrong and I am a smartass prick who doesn't care about anyone but myself. 12-14 was rough. School work stress was quite tame by comparison. At least your teachers don't scream at you for hours until you forget why.
- squigz 2mo agoThis is what I think of when I think of "early life stress" in kids - not worrying about school.
- mrguyorama 2mo agoIt's called "Adverse Childhood Experiences", or ACEs, and the field of psychology has found them to be extremely good predictors of future negative outcomes for a long time now. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/ Things like abuse, neglect, natural disasters, basically anything that can cause trauma or significant stress. Be a toddler and your mom's new boyfriend abuses both of you? Congrats, you brain has developed in a way that will not be conducive at all to your future, because instead of developing a functional reward system, you've developed a specific hyperawareness to manage the difficulty of living around one kind of abuser. This incredibly specific adaptation will of course, not prevent you from being an easy target for an entirely different type of abuser in high school. (It's actually not that simple of course. Multiple ACEs are predictive of future troubles, not just one, so it's more like "A child who lives in an environment of constant stress, fear, and pain is likely to have a brain that didn't develop well" with a direction of effect unstated) This is one reason why things like abuse and poverty are so damn cyclical. Your parents grew up in poverty and with abusive parents, so they have an elevated chance to abuse their children, and on and on and on. This is also one reason why something like "Free food at school for anyone who wants it" is so damn effective, because it eliminates an entire class of ACEs from all those kids, and in the US, it also eliminates the horrific humiliation machine we've built around paying for school lunch, which might not be the best way to raise kids anyway.
- mjevans 2mo agoIt takes a village is so true. Children are something society as a whole should invest in, and fails to do so at risk to it's own future. By society, I mean every one of us that plans to grow old instead of an early death. Wouldn't it be nice to have two or three or ideally more generations of well adjusted people that grew up not fearful of hunger, nor lack of basic shelter, medical care? Also, providing quality child care for any time the parent(s) are working frees up quality workers to do that... though a better work life balance would also help society.
- verisimi 2mo ago[dead]
- exe34 2mo agoThis reminds me of my father. I used to play a game: the moment I hear something crashing or I hear him swearing, I try to guess how he was going to pin that on me. I got pretty good at that game! As an adult though, I've had several people tell me to stop apologising for existing.
- golly_ned 2mo agoI don't think that's what they mean by 'early-life'.
- astura 2mo ago...Or 'stress' for that matter.
- leoh 2mo agoI remember having this in middle school, it was a nightmare and majorly fucked me up
- syllogism 2mo agoThe optimal amount of stress about that stuff is not zero, and most teenagers are going to be desperately biased towards "none of this matters, just peermax".
- AngryData 2mo agoCouldn't some of that because of how people act like EVERYTHING is the most important thing for kids to do, irregardless of how it actually stacks up, and some develop something akin to alarm fatigue and stop listening? Plus almost everyone can get into a college, there is only really competition for a handful of elite schools. My college wanted SAT scores for admission, I did not take the SAT, they still admitted me without question. As long as you don't fail out your first two semesters in a row most colleges don't give two craps about your highschool performance.
- coldtea 2mo agoThe healthy reaction for 16-18 years old is to not give a damn about that, rebel, and discover the other (or the same) sex and partying.
- euroderf 2mo agoNot to mention having all this on your permanent record.
- InterviewFrog 2mo agoAlexander the Great won his first battle at the age of 18. Treating 16 to 18 year old like 5 year olds is not the right way to go about it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- asphodele 2mo agoSitting Bull killed his first buffalo with bow and arrow from horseback at the age of 10.
- danparsonson 2mo agoNot exactly a representative example you picked there though
- Noaidi 2mo agoAlexander the Great died when he was 33.
- porridgeraisin 2mo agoIs it wrong?
- basisword 2mo agoExam pressure isn't the kind of stress they're talking about. >> More than half of the world’s children are exposed to early-life stress from abuse, household dysfunction such as violence or drug use, or other traumatic experiences
- slfnflctd 2mo agoI was utterly convinced at age 14 that I had ruined my life and any chance of a good career. I also was pretty sure the world was going to end soon. I started smoking cigarettes and experimenting with various risky behaviors. A few years later, I became suicidal for a time. It wasn't until my late 20s that I started living a more 'normal' life, but by then I was a decade behind in career development and other things. Academic concerns may not by themselves count as trauma, but combined with other factors they can be the thing that pushes someone into total hopelessness.
- Noaidi 2mo agoJust FYI, that type of stress is typically not included as a form of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). That does not mean I think it does not matter. It does, and more so for kids with poor diets. My childhood ACE's: Woke up on an operating table when I was three, mother and brother attempted suicide, Mother with schizoaffective disorder, physical abuse by my brothers, psychological torture by my brother (he forced me to watch him burn a nest full of baby birds with a blow torch).
- madaxe_again 2mo agoI remember being sodomised by the geography master at primary school, and being beaten by masters almost daily. They’d withhold food and sleep from us as punishment. I wouldn’t see my parents for three months at a time. You had to exist with eyes in the back of your head. But shit man, yeah, exams.
- nemosaltat 2mo agoWhen our Little, Stuart falls down we don’t even know what he remembers. [in mice]
- naikrovek 2mo ago[dead]
- ls612 2mo agoIn mice.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- leoh 2mo ago"In mice" is the right caveat for outcomes and the wrong one for mechanisms. Nobody’s selling you a drug here--they’re describing a chromatin change, and that’s the part rodents are actually good for. The alternative study design is randomizing infants to early-life stress and biopsying their hippocampi at 30. Committee’s still reviewing it.
- dang 2mo agoInmiced above.
- LightBug1 2mo agoAre you a man or a mouse?
- jdw64 2mo agoThen my brain must be full of scars.
- sph 2mo agoThese pop-sci articles annoy me greatly. All I can think reading the title is “well, duh?” - they’re a complete tautology. Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically. If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress. This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”
- hamper653 2mo ago> Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. That record needn’t be inside individual brain cells.
- oharapj 2mo agoIt also doesn’t need to be a scar.. much easier to explain things as obvious post hoc than to predict them I fear
- mattmcknight 2mo agoScar is also a very loaded word to use here for something that is not a scar.
- T-A 2mo ago> if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it Yes, and it (or at least one of them) has now been found. Maybe you don't care about knowledge for its own sake, but as the "irritating" press release goes on to point out, “There are currently no treatments for what early-life stress does to the brain, partially because we have not had a clear picture of what molecular mechanisms to target,” Peña said. “This work is exciting because it reveals a clear mechanism, and also helps explain why the impact of stress is both latent and broad.
- anigbrowl 2mo agoNot to play down anyone's stressful life experiences, but the sort of stress they're talking about in this article is more typically correlated with stressors like violence, hunger, or institutionalization in the first decade of life.
- genxy 2mo agoSo millions of kids in Gaza. :(
- tosti 2mo ago[flagged]
- ballsack1 2mo ago[flagged]
- trehalose 2mo agoArguing about who's the largest group of traumatized children and which groups are less significant trivializes all childhood trauma.
- cultofmetatron 2mo ago> Sure, never mind the millions of jews in concentration camps. Or what about the jews being terrorized by the likes of hamas, al-queda, taliban, al-shebab, IS, or any other islamic terror organization worldwide? Over the past 80 years, the number of children involved may dwarf the figure you got from hamas. the levels of shamelessness here on display here is breathtaking...
- Noaidi 2mo agoNot a scar IMHO, but a wound that can be healed. SETD7 is a Histone Methyltransferase. Meaning it attaches methyl groups to DNA which turns genes off. But there are enzymes that remove these methyl groups as well and they are called Demethylases [1]. Many of these enzymes can be stimulated by their nutritional cofactors which are things like Zinc, Iron, and Riboflavin. I am a product of early life trauma. Knowing these thing have helped me tremendously. [1] https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q8NB78/entry https://www.uniprot.org/uniprotkb/Q8NB78/entry
- diydsp 2mo agoWait that's very interesting. Any suggs for bio hacking? Iiuc zinc can be tricky/fraught to experiment with and iron somewhat risky. Don't know about B2. So perhaps start with each one on small dose, one week one, two weeks off, keep a journal, making no other changes? And any suggs for things to avoid?
- Noaidi 2mo agoI would never suggest anything. We each have our own genetic/environmental needs. But you can get tested for many of these nutrients to see if you have a deficiency.
- madaxe_again 2mo agoI find enough weed to sink a battleship also works.
- 47282847 2mo agoFor research in human spheres: https://birthpsychology.com/ https://birthpsychology.com/ - really interesting material!
- sajithdilshan 2mo agoWhenever I’m having a dream at night, it’s always about my childhood and always at the place I grew up. It feels like my mind is a prisoner of the place I grew up. Childhood stress and trauma is deeply burnt into my brain I guess
- cfiggers 2mo agoEMDR is an amazing thing, you might look into it. Be well, friend.