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Early trauma can reset stress response and cognitive systems in directions that predispose to a variety of later psychiatric disorders. To analyze the impact of childhood adversity on gene expression in these systems in the hippocampus, Canadian investigators compared methylation of promoters for 23,551 hippocampal genes in 25 people who died by suicide and had a history of severe childhood abuse with 16 matched controls who died suddenly and had no childhood abuse histories.
Compared with samples from controls, samples from abuse/suicide individuals had hypermethylation (associated with decreased gene expression) or hypomethylation (associated with greater gene expression) of 362 neuronal genes. Genes that regulate neuronal plasticity were …