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To augment psychological theories of how childhood adverse experiences can predispose to adult psychopathology, investigators in Canada examined expression of the kappa opioid receptor gene in a postmortem brain study of approximately 100 people.
There were three groups — those who died of suicide and had a history of childhood abuse, those who died of suicide but did not have a history of childhood abuse, and normal controls without childhood abuse who died in accidents. In analyses controlling for multiple confounding factors, the childhood-abuse group (but not the suicide-only group) had lower hydroxymethylation of an intron of a variant of the kappa opioid receptor in the anterior insula, leading to decreased expression of that variant. …