Early life stress and programming psychiatric risk
What we experience as a child often has a lasting impression on our behaviour throughout the course of our life. Stressful and adverse experience during early life of an individual can often lead to a lasting vulnerability towards developing psychiatric disorders in adult life, a question particularly pertinent to the current times when depression has emerged as one of the greatest challenges to global health. In a recent study, the Vaidya lab has tested the idea via switching on the signaling pathway that leads to overactivation of excitatory neurons within the forebrain, using genetically engineered mice.