COMPAS/PRIYOMBODO (PRI)
A toddler plays in a fountain accompanied by his parents at Taman Gandaria Tengah, Kramat Pela, Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta, Sunday (01/10/2023).
JAKARTA, KOMPAS — Stress early in life can have a serious impact on a person’s physical health and behavior later in life. New research finds that stress during this period can change the activation levels of more genes in the brain than those changed by a blow to the head.
The negative impact of stress in childhood was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and released by The Ohio State University on Monday (11/13/2023). Kathryn Lenz, a psychology professor from The Ohio State University, was the principal investigator of this study. This research was supported by Ohio State’s Chronic Brain Injury Institute, the Brain Injury Association of America, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
It is known that head injuries are common in young children, especially due to falls, and can be associated with mood disorders and social difficulties that emerge later in life. Adverse experiences in childhood are also very common and can increase the risk of illness, mental illness, and substance abuse in adulthood.
“However, we don’t know how these two things might interact,” said Lenz. ”We wanted to understand whether experiencing a traumatic brain injury in the context of stressful circumstances early in life could modulate the response to brain injury. And using animal models allows us to really understand the mechanisms by which these two things can impact brain development,” he said.
The first series of experiments conducted on mice shows that potential stress early in life can lead to lifelong health consequences. “We found many more genes that were differentially expressed as a result of manipulation of early life stress compared to manipulation of traumatic brain injury,” said Lenz.
According to him, stress is very influential and we should not underestimate the impact of stress early in life on brain development. “I think stress tends to be overlooked, but it’s a very important public health topic,” he said.
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KOMPAS/P RADITYA MAHENDRA YASAA pile of toys that provide play facilities for children while undergoing assistance in handling stunting at Rumah Pelita, Semarang City, Central Java, Friday (27/10/2023).
Experiment
The researchers temporarily separated newborn mice from their mothers every day for 14 days to induce stress that mimics the effects of adverse childhood experiences, which include a variety of potentially traumatic events.
On the 15th day, when the mice’s development was equivalent to that of toddlers, stressed and non-stressed mice were given a head injury, such as a concussion with anesthesia or without a head injury. Three conditions, namely stress alone, head injury alone, and stress, combined with head injury were compared with uninjured and non-stressed mice.
First author Michaela Breach, a graduate student in Lenz’s laboratory, examined changes in gene expression in the hippocampal region of the animal brain in the juvenile period using single-nucleus RNA sequencing.
Stress alone and stress combined with traumatic brain injury produce some noteworthy outcomes. Both conditions activate pathways in excitatory and inhibitory neurons that are related to plasticity, namely the brain’s ability to adapt to all kinds of changes. Mostly this is to increase flexibility, but sometimes, if the change is maladaptive it can result in negative outcomes.
“This may indicate that the brain is opening to a new period of vulnerability or is actively changing during this time period when the brain can program deficits for later life,” Breach said.
Both conditions also impact signals related to oxytocin, a hormone associated with maternal behavior and social bonding. Stress alone and combined with traumatic brain injury activates this oxytocin pathway, but brain injury alone inhibits it.
“Both stress and traumatic brain injury are associated with abnormal social behavior, but we found these different effects through oxytocin signaling,” says Breach.
This suggests that the effects of stress may modulate how traumatic brain injury changes the brain because combined treatment is different from traumatic brain injury alone. “Oxytocin is involved in the response to stress and repair so it could be an interesting modulator for us to pursue in the future,” he said.
In behavioral tests on mice that had entered adulthood, only animals that experienced stress early in life tended to enter wide open spaces more often, locations that usually make rodents feel vulnerable to predators.
” Overall, this suggests that they may take more risks later in life, which is consistent with human data showing that stress early in life can increase the risk of certain conditions, such as ADHD, which can be characterized by risk-taking behavior or substance use disorders ,” said Breach.
According to Lenz, behavioral data showing the detrimental impact of stress early in life provides further evidence of the need to address adverse childhood experiences.
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“Things like social support and enrichment can buffer the impact of early life stress which has been shown in animal models and humans,” he said. “I don’t think we can overemphasize how damaging early life stressors can be if left untreated,” he added.
2023-11-20 01:05:36
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