By Neuroscience News
Childhood trauma shapes our minds, but how exactly? The puzzle has long intrigued the scientific community.
A team from KAIST, led by Professor Won-Suk Chung, have made a groundbreaking discovery, unearthing a crucial link between childhood trauma and mental illness.
Stress hormones lead to an excessive removal of excitatory synapses by astrocytes, offering a direct cause for mental health conditions triggered by early-life stress.
In-depth screening of an FDA-approved drug revealed the intriguing role of stress hormones, synthetic glucocorticoids, in enhancing astrocyte-mediated phagocytosis to an abnormal degree.
Using mouse models, researchers found stress hormones bind to astrocytes' glucocorticoid receptors, boosting the expression of Mer tyrosine kinase, vital in astrocyte phagocytosis.
This discovery confirms childhood stress hormones specifically trigger a response in astrocytes, not microglia, leading to the removal of specific excitatory synapses.
The question remains: does this happen in humans too? Using a brain organoid from human-induced pluripotent stem cells, the team found the same synapse control mechanism in humans.
Professor Chung believes controlling the immune response of astrocytes could be a key to understanding and treating brain diseases. A hopeful beacon shines on the horizon of mental health research.