Doctoral Dissertation Research: Biosocial dynamics of intergenerational transmission of stress

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This doctoral research project examines how trauma experienced by women may be transmitted across generations, affecting their well-being and the well-being of their children. Working with populations who have endured high-stress environments, the investigators will conduct in-depth interviews with women when they are pregnant and subsequently measure markers of stress in those women and their infants, to understand how trauma affects women and children socially, emotionally, and biologically. Through these bio-ethnographic methods, the project will advance our understanding of epigenetic responses to the environment in humans. The project will also contribute to graduate training and mentoring and may inform public health research and behavioral health interventions. This project considers how biosocial inheritance, or the means by which social adversity or advantage is transmitted across generations, may play a role in intergenerational trauma. Specifically, this project considers (1) how women enduring adverse environments subjectively construct their traumatic experience; (2) whether maternal trauma may be "molecularized" at the level of the epigenome; (3) whether maternal traumatic experience is associated with neuroendocrine stress during pregnancy; and (4) whether maternal epigenetic or neuroendocrine signals correspond to those seen in offspring in early life. In this study of 112 mother-infant dyads, mothers' subjective appraisals of trauma will be elicited through semi-structured and life history interviews, which will be used to contextualize their responses to a survey of traumatic exposure and a trauma symptoms checklist. Their biological incorporation of trauma will be assessed with measures of DNA methylation and hair cortisol concentration. Methylation will be measured at five genes that are involved in the neuroendocrine stress response: NR3C1, FKBP5, BDNF, SLC6A4, and MAOA. To evaluate for broader patterns of epigenetic modification, epigenome-wide methylation analyses will also be conducted. To investigate the potential for intergenerational programming, this project will measure chronic cortisol secretion in mothers, cortisol reactivity following a modest stressor in infants at eight weeks of age, and DNA methylation at these five stress-related loci in both mothers and infants.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.