Tópico: Abuso pode causar mudanças genéticas no cérebro achadas em vítimas de suicídio

[Buckaroo Banzai]

Abuse may trigger gene changes found in suicide victims
01:00 07 May 2008

Early child abuse may forever change the way genes are expressed in the brain, suggests a postmortem study of people who died by suicide. [...]

In 2004, for instance, Moshe Szyf and his colleagues at McGill University in Montreal showed that rat pups neglected by their mothers had different levels of methylation and different stress responses from those that were well-cared for. They also showed that, with careful interventions, this could be reversed.

[...] So his team examined the brains of 13 suicide victims who had a history of early neglect or abuse, and compared them to 11 age and gender matched controls, who had had normal upbringings but had died in sudden accidents.

The researchers were especially interested in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved in memory and mood, and is known to be smaller in people who have suffered abuse.

They examined genes in the hippocampus involved in controlling protein-producing RNA, and they found that in the suicide victims, a much higher proportion of these genes had been switched off, suggesting the hippocampus was indeed less active.

[...]

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/dn13844-abuse-may-trigger-gene-changes-found-in-suicide-victims.html?feedId=online-news_rss20