14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of a study published in the latest online issue of the esteemed journal PLoS ONE, it would appear that kids who go through very stressful experiences during their early years of life tend to display an increased risk of genetic mutations.
In addition, the team behind the study also found that stressful events can change an individual's risk of developing a psychiatric disorder later on in life. The work was carried out by a team of scientists based at the Brown University Butler Hospital.
Childhood adversity, they discovered, can lead to epigenetic changes in the human glucocorticoid receptor gene. This particular gene plays a very important role in regulating the way in which the human body responds to stressors from our surroundings.
Some of the events that experts managed to associate with this negative effect include the loss of one or both parents, maltreatment and abuse. Kids who experience any of these stressors are at higher risk of suffering from anxiety and depression when they grow a little older.
According to the team, the field of epigenetics deals with figuring out when and why genes are turned on or off, as opposed to the study of actual mutations that influence the genetic material itself. Epigenetics looks for the modifications that lead to abnormal gene activation patterns.
“We need to understand the biology of this effect in order to develop better treatment and prevention programs. Our research group turned to the field of epigenetics to determine how environmental conditions in childhood can influence the biological stress response,” says Audrey Tyrka, MD, PhD.
The fact that a connection appears to exist between childhood maltreatment and psychiatric disorders has been known for quite some time, but the exact mechanisms through which this influence was exerted was not understood.
This is where the epigenetic approach came in. The Brown group decided to focus on the glucocorticoid receptor precisely because it plays such an important role in controlling our body's response to stress.
“Our results suggest that exposure to stressful experiences during childhood may actually alter the programming of an individual’s genome,” Tyrka goes on to say, quoted by PsychCentral.
“This concept may have broad public health implications, as it could be a mechanism for the association of childhood trauma with poor health outcomes, including psychiatric disorders as well as medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease,” she concludes.