Kobor – epigenetic examples in the early years

We have shown for example things like in our most recent work we have shown that it’s the parental stress that kids are exposed to, and it’s actually quite interesting in this particular work that we just recently published in collaboration with folks at the University of Wisconsin, and here at UBC, that actually it’s quite distinct, so it seems like the stress of the mother affects these dimmer switches in infancy. In contrast, the stress of the father affects these dimmer switches during the preschool period, and even more specifically, it only affects it in the girls, versus the mom’s stress affects both girls and boys, so that’s quite remarkable, and it fits very well with what people know about the interplay of parental influences and kids’ behaviour during these developmental periods. We’ve also shown, and others have shown that as well, for example, early life socio-economic starters can tweak with those dimmer switches. So for example, if you grow up in a low socio-economic status environment for the first five years of life, we can see that 20-30 years later in those dimmer switches in that they are set in a way you’re more likely to have inflammation and things like that in your system. That in turn, we actually also found reassuringly, that can be buffered up to some extent by maternal warmth. So it’s this kind of social environment. if you will. which can set these dimmer switches. There’s work out there that physical environment, certain chemicals in the environment can set these dimmer switches, so I think it’s very early days for this research, and I’m looking forward over the next few years to have a much broader catalogue of influences that can set these dimmer switches and also perhaps to understand whether there are particularly sensitive periods. We always think that the early years are very sensitive, there’s certainly evidence for this, but we haven’t really tested, in a longitudinal fashion, how that actually develops over, say, the course of childhood.