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How adversity gets under the skin

Nature Neuroscience volume 12, pages 241–243 (2009)Cite this article

This article has been updated

Rat models implicate epigenetic regulation of hippocampal glucocorticoid receptor expression in mediating the effects of early life experience on adult behavior. A report now suggests that the same mechanism might also be at work in humans.

The ancient question of how early life experience influences adult behavior has produced many answers and even whole intellectual movements, such as psychoanalysis. The stakes are high, not only for human self-understanding, but also for the development of more effective interventions for treating and perhaps even preventing neuropsychiatric disorders that produce a substantial burden of suffering and disability. Unfortunately, it has been very difficult to elucidate any of the mechanisms by which even highly stressful experiences 'get under the skin' to produce long-term alterations in human physiology and behavior. In this issue, McGowan et al.1 take a step toward elucidating some of these mechanisms. The authors report that epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene, NR3C1, observed in humans who had been abused as children is consistent with predictions derived from a rodent model in which early postnatal experience influences adult responses to stress.

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Figure 1: High licking and grooming of rat pups increases serotonin tone in the brain.

Kim Caesar

Figure 2: The HPA axis is under the excitatory control of the amygdala and inhibitory control of the hippocampus.

Kim Caesar

Change history

  • 16 March 2009

    In the version of this article initially published, the first sentence of the first full paragraph on p. 243 should read: “Turning to the potential epigenetic mechanisms underlying these changes in glucocorticoid receptor expression, McGowan et al.1 found that there are higher levels of exon 1F methylation in suicide victims with a history of being abused than in nonabused suicide victims or controls.” The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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  1. The author is in the Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Office of the Provost, Massachusetts Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. seh@harvard.edu,

    Steven E Hyman

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Hyman, S. How adversity gets under the skin. Nat Neurosci 12, 241–243 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0309-241

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