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.
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
Rights Holder
Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Provenance
Received from CHORUS
Language
English (eng)
Publication Title
Developmental Psychobiology
Volume
61
Issue
3
First Page
323
Last Page
340
ISSN
1098-2302
Recommended Citation
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