Programming effects of adolescent experience on adult phenotype
Exposure to stress during adolescence can shape behavior, cognition, and physiology in adulthood. The consequences of these long-term changes remain unclear, in part because the impact of a long-term change can be specific to the context an animal encounters in adulthood. The idea that developmental changes can tailor a phenotype to suit similar conditions later in life is an idea that spans fields and decades. My work has shown that stress exposure in adolescence can transform the cognitive strategies and abilities of adult animals, even after stress exposure has ceased and animals have resided in safe environments for the majority of their lifespans. Thus, I believe that understanding the lasting effects of early stress requires longitudinal assessment of context-specific outcomes. I also believe that understanding the evolutionary context of mammalian responses to adverse environments during development can provide important insights for human disease interventions, focusing on the interplay between adversity during adolescent development and posttraumatic stress disorder.
Related publications Problem-solving in adulthood following chronic stress exposure in adolescence My work has shown that exposure to chronic unpredictable stress in adolescence can cause accelerated decision making, and enhance foraging performance in a high-threat context but not a low-threat context. Rather than requiring a tradeoff in vigilance, under low-threat conditions, rats exposed to stress in adolescence spend more time being vigilant compared with unstressed rats, suggesting that exposure to stress in adolescence enhances anticipation of threat in adulthood. Related publications Learning and memory in adulthood following chronic stress exposure in adolescence Adolescents differ from adults in their strategies and capacities for learning and memory, underpinned by neurological structures undergoing maturational changes. Adolescent experiences shape these maturational processes and can cause shifts in learning and memory strategies and abilities that persist into adulthood. In my research, I have found that rats exposed to chronic unpredictable stress in adolescence exhibit enhanced reversal learning, an indicator of behavioral flexibility, but show no change in associative learning and reference memory abilities compared with rats reared without stress. Working memory, which in humans is thought to underpin reasoning, mathematical skills, and reading comprehension, may be enhanced by exposure to adolescent-stress under low-threat conditions, but after a novel disturbance, animals stressed in adolescence exhibit a 5-fold decrease in working memory performance while unstressed rats continue to exhibit a linear learning curve. Related publications Affective changes in adulthood following chronic stress exposure in adolescence Exposure to stress in adolescence can cause lasting shifts towards negative affective states, which, in humans, can detract from wellbeing and general health outcomes. My work has shown that adult rats exposed to stress in adolescence can exhibit a negative judgement bias, an increased frustration response, and an increase in anxiety-like behavior. Related publications |
Understanding vulnerabilities to posttraumatic stress disorder
Over decades, evidence for and against enhanced vulnerability to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adolescence has been mounting, but much of this evidence is retrospective or complicated by variation in prior stress exposure and trauma context. I aim to understand how adolescents differ in vulnerability to PTSD, both immediately after trauma and as a result of increased stress load across their lifetime, using human data and rodent models to control stress exposure.
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Wayne State University
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