Boyce – stress and epigenetic changes

We know that there are these powerful effects of socioeconomic status on health outcomes. Little people, big people, mental health, physical health, it’s always there. In fact, it’s the most powerful predictor of health and illness that we have within our toolkit of epidemiologic predictors. The question is how does that happen, and one of the ways we think it happens is that people who live in more disadvantaged communities, neighbourhoods, families, have far more in the way of stress and adversity that they deal with than do people from more affluent communities. And that stress comes in the form of parental depression, parental separation, violence, noise, housing problems, all kinds of ways in which both kids and adults in disadvantaged groups have more in the way of stress.  

So what we have been now studying is how this differential exposure to stress may be affecting health through what we call epigenetic changes in the structure of the genome that may lead to the turning on and off of genes that control the brain which then affect mental health outcomes like depression or anxiety or whatever.  

We do know that in experimental animal models that these affects can be transmitted across generations. We don’t yet know for sure whether that is actually molecular biologic transfer across generations or whether it’s behavioural, that it’s sort of the behaviour that’s imparted to one generation then gets imparted to the next generation and so on. But certainly in lower animal models there is evidence that epigenetic structural confirmation changes in the DNA can go from one generation to another. Whether that happens in humans or not, is still, we’re still not clear about.