Looking Back and Moving Forward: Evaluating and Advancing Translation from Animal Models to Human Studies of Early Life Stress and DNA Methylation

Publication Date

4-2019

Document Type

Article

Organizational Units

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Psychology

Keywords

Early life stress (ELS), DNA methylation, Epigenetic methodologies, Human studies

Abstract

Advances in epigenetic methodologies have deepened theoretical explanations of mechanisms linking early life stress (ELS) and disease outcomes and suggest promising targets for intervention. To date, however, human studies have not capitalized on the richness of diverse animal models to derive and systematically evaluate specific and testable hypotheses. To promote cross‐species dialog and scientific advance, here we provide a classification scheme to systematically evaluate the match between characteristics of human and animal studies of ELS and DNA methylation. Three preclinical models were selected that are highly cited, and that differ in the nature and severity of the ELS manipulation as well as in the affected epigenetic loci (the licking and grooming, maternal separation, and caregiver maltreatment models). We evaluated the degree to which human studies matched these preclinical models with respect to the timing of ELS and of DNA methylation assessment, as well as the type of ELS, whether sex differences were explicitly examined, the tissue sampled, and the targeted loci. Results revealed

Copyright Date

11-13-2018

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Rights Holder

Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Provenance

Received from CHORUS

Language

English (eng)

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. User is responsible for all copyright compliance. This article was originally published as:

Watamura, S. E., & Roth, T. L. (2019). Looking back and moving forward: Evaluating and advancing translation from animal models to human studies of early life stress and DNA methylation. Developmental Psychobiology, 61(3), 323-340. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.21796

Accepted Manuscript is openly available through the "Link to Full Text" button.

The published Version of Record is available at libraries through Compass or Worldcat.

Publication Title

Developmental Psychobiology

Volume

61

Issue

3

First Page

323

Last Page

340

ISSN

1098-2302

PubMed ID

30426484

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