Abstract
Environmental influences such as perinatal stress have been shown to program the developing organism to adapt brain and behavioral functions to cope with daily life challenges. Evidence is now accumulating that the specific and individual effects of early life adversity on the functional development of brain and behavior emerge as a function of the type, intensity, timing and the duration of the adverse environment, and that early life stress (ELS) is a major risk factor for developing behavioral dysfunctions and mental disorders. Results from clinical as well as experimental studies in animal models support the hypothesis that ELS can induce functional “scars” in prefrontal and limbic brain areas, regions that are essential for emotional control, learning and memory functions. On the other hand, the concept of “stress inoculation” is emerging from more recent research, which revealed positive functional adaptations in response to ELS resulting in resilience against stress and other adversities later in life. Moreover, recent studies indicate that early life experiences and the resulting behavioral consequences can be transmitted to the next generation, leading to a transgenerational cycle of adverse or positive adaptations of brain function and behavior. In this review we propose a unifying view of stress vulnerability and resilience by connecting genetic predisposition and programming sensitivity to the context of experience-expectancy and transgenerational epigenetic traits. The adaptive maturation of stress responsive neural and endocrine systems requires environmental challenges to optimize their functions. Repeated environmental challenges can be viewed within the framework of the match/mismatch hypothesis, the outcome, psychopathology or resilience, depends on the respective predisposition and on the context later in life.
Highlights
THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE-EXPECTANT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT: WINDOWS OF STRESS VULNERABILITY AND STRESS RESILIENCE—TIMING MATTERS! The neuroanatomist and Nobel price awardee Camillo Golgi stated in 1869 that “functional scars in the brain” might be the organic cause of mental disorders
The outcome of stress exposure depends on the maturational status of a given brain region, e.g., disorders arising from exposure to adversity at times of frontal cortex development should differ from those of the hippocampus or the amygdala
Life stress results in improved performance in a two-way active avoidance paradigm in both, male and female offspring (Schäble et al, 2007; Abraham and Gruss, 2010). These findings indicate that repeated early life stress exposure might result in more active and efficient coping with stressful situations and can be discussed in the context of the match/mismatch stress hypothesis (Oitzl et al, 2010; Schmidt, 2011; Frankenhuis and Del Giudice, 2012; Nederhof and Schmidt, 2012)
Summary
THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE-EXPECTANT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT: WINDOWS OF STRESS VULNERABILITY AND STRESS RESILIENCE—TIMING MATTERS! The neuroanatomist and Nobel price awardee Camillo Golgi stated in 1869 that “functional scars in the brain” might be the organic cause of mental disorders. The vulnerability hypothesis (Charney and Manji, 2004) proposes that differences in neuronal structure or the volume of a given brain region rather represent pre-existing risk factors to develop behavioral dysfunctions, which are induced by genetic predisposition and/or early stress exposure.
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