Intergenerational changes in hippocampal transcription in an animal model of maternal depression

Abstract

Chronic stress during early life, such as exposure to prenatal and postnatal depression or deficits in parental care, can have persistent adverse behavioural effects (Murgatroyd et al., 2010(Murgatroyd et al., , 2015Peña et al., 2017). Such long-term stressrelated disruptions in behaviour have been documented in both human and rodent studies of offspring exposed to a variety of early-life stressors, including maternal depression (Hammen

Comorbid depression and anxiety: Integration of insights from attachment theory and cognitive neuroscience, and their implications for research and treatment

“…More generally, patterns of attachment are known to be stable across generations, and this may reflect a bidirectional link with anxiety and depression: the presence of these disorders in a parent may both reflect their own childhood experiences and insecure attachment, and predict insecure attachment and subsequent anxiety or depression in their children (Galbally et al, 2022). Such an "intergenerational" transmission of attachment security has also been demonstrated in animal models, and been linked to altered expression of specific genes in the brain (Alyamani et al, 2021). A circular process of this sort offers opportunities for early intervention (e.g., identification and management of internalizing symptoms in children of depressed mothers) or even prevention (e.g., attachment-based therapies for parents whose depression and anxiety is related to attachment insecurity, thereby preventing the "transmission" of an insecure attachment style).…”

EJN stress, brain and behaviour special issue

“…One is certainly the timing of the stressful challenge and the context. Especially early in life exposure to adversity has lasting impacts on brain and behaviour (Čater & Majdič, 2021; Clinton et al, 2021; Roque et al, 2021; Wang et al, 2021), specifically also with regard to addiction and reward circuitry (Roque et al, 2021; Rudolph et al, 2020; Levis et al, 2021; Mooney‐Leber et al, 2021), pain responding (Melchior et al, 2021), epigenetic programming (Alyamani et al, 2021; Womersley et al, 2021), neuroinflammation (Friend et al, 2020; Marsland et al, 2021) and in interaction with the metabolic regulation (Berry et al, 2021). Beyond this, it is even unclear how ‘normative’ developmental experiences contribute to stress‐related behaviours (Farber et al, 2020), but it may be that broader environmental factors, such as access to green space, may contribute to resilience and reduced stress responding (Rojas‐Carvajal et al, 2021).…”