Course-Correcting Early Stress

he adolescence of a rat spans only about three weeks. Yet that tiny snapshot of time may provide insight that can impact humans several decades into adulthood.

Jill McGaughy, professor of psychology at UNH, is working to highlight the ways in which early life stressors — malnutrition, for example — cause issues related to attention that linger well into adulthood, far beyond the duration researchers have previously estimated.

“These road maps are laid down really early. We now know that childhood adverse events are a major factor in how your mental health and cognition look throughout your life,” McGaughy says.

“One of the goals is to try to identify those changes as early as we can and get its neurochemical signature so we can link it with, hopefully, pharmacological intervention,” McGaughy says. Research shows early life insults can make adults more vulnerable to neuropsychiatric diseases that McGaughy and her team would like to “interrupt and say, ‘OK, we can correct course.’”

Because the life span of a rat is comparatively short, it allows for results to be observed much sooner than in a human population. McGaughy notes that her lab can control elements of a rat’s environment that can be naturally occurring, such as malnutrition, and quickly witness outcomes.

“One of the things we’re looking at is if you have an acute stress in adolescence, how does the brain response of that adolescent rat differ from acute stress in an adult when tested in an attentional task?” McGaughy says. “Because with a rat you only have three weeks of adolescence, we can get that data very rapidly. And the idea is to be able to intercede there, at that stage.”