Early adversity leaves lasting molecular imprint across the body: primate study | Hacker News Reader

Early adversity leaves lasting molecular imprint across the body: primate study

medicalxpress.com

82 pointsgmays51 comments

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea4922

The study looked at 237 rhesus macaques. I can only read the abstract, which doesn't clarify how they determined their early life adversity.

The abstract doesn't make very strong claims about how much an impact they saw, only that they started to see some patterns emerge.

The patterns were also not even consistent in the same direction, with some of their measurements correlating adversity with changes that "looked like" the opposite of accelerated aging.

> "In some cases, adversity-related changes looked like accelerated aging. In others, they went in the opposite direction," explained co-lead author Rachel Petersen

I would like to read the full paper, but this feels like there are several layers of PR speak on top of what they were studying.

Many factors can impact the markers they're measuring, including body size, so this paper shouldn't be used as evidence that we can measure trauma directly or anything like that. They were searching for patterns and differences, but there isn't a clear or even uni-directional link with adversity.

So the body does keep the score?

Yes, but if you look at it medically the book is still bullshit. The body adapts to early trauma. It doesn't adapt back. That's just not what it's designed to do.

Even DNA methylation follows that principle: easy to put the tags in. Very hard to take them back out (mostly happens during cell division which happens less and less when you age)

Of course if you took this message to patients as a therapist, good luck holding a job.

I once listened to a scientific presentation that was interesting, but I don't remember the professor's name or whether his hypotheses have panned out long-term. That said, he flipped the script on the usual take on research trying to understand why some people respond to early adversity by going off the rails while others seem to trek through it relatively unaffected with positive outcomes. Usually the research focus had been on what differed in a person who would withstand the adversity without asking whether there was a tradeoff for the decreased vulnerability to early adversity. He then went on and presented initial evidence that, on the hand, the individuals that can do all right no matter what, they tended to never particularly excel, while on the other hand, individuals sensitive to early adversity tended to either crash hard or soar higher.

The idea was, thinking about species fitness, it made sense for some of the population that can make it through the hard times, and some of the population that can really take advantage of the good times, even if that meant very poor outcomes in the bad times...It's a hedging-like evolutionary strategy to try to make the most, at the population level, with what you are given.

Anyway, I found it provacative to think about.

Isn’t species fitness somewhat weak, though? I would want to think about this in terms of gene fitness. Over long periods of time, in different situations, genes that promote one strategy or the other will dominate part of the time and lose part of the time.

it is manifestation of a physical law at a higher level of organization.

it is gene fitness, except the observer is focused on species population level dynamics rather than individual level dynamics.

they may look very different however the fundamental mechanism is contribution of a biopolymer to variations of biological fitness

That makes sense from an evolutionary fitness perspective, but also just a social one. Consider the life outcomes of someone willing to gamble on founding a company, going out to settle a new land, or just take a social risk; compared to someone who works a mediocre entry level job for 20 years, never leaves their place of birth, or is a wallflower. The risk-taker can experience far more pronounced success or failures.

Higher highs, lower lows.

Almost anything can be made sense of from an evolutionary perspective. Often even the opposite of what's being observed. Can be a fun game to play. The corollary is it's not useful for vetting theories for plausibility.

Certainly. However generating ideas from that perspective then taking it to gather empirical data testing whether that kind of dynamic exists, without relying on evolutionary time, is just fine.

sounds like he didn't say much, saying either you overcome adversity or you don't.

I gather he said you want population diversity. He might have said something about its distribution too.

Yes.

No. He was suggesting that resiliency traits/genes have a cost and a benefit: high certainty of adequate mediocrity, while lack of resilience traits/genes leads to more context dependent outcomes with a wider distribution of outcomes (more frequent extremes in ability, etc).

Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance: a critical perspective[2024]

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/epigenetics-and-epigeno...

Whats the pitfall when research like this doesn't account for side effects like if you had early adversity, usually your nutrition, physical environment can also have a big impact across your body, vs people without adversity and had bad nutrition/enviroment.

Maybe colleges and scholarships that make admission decisions based on adversity can someday objectively measure it by DNA methylation. Also for reparations or welfare benefits. It would seem to be a more direct proxy than melanin pigment density.

But on the other hand, adversity does not equal disadvantage, and in fact the trials that leave those marks -- beneath some threshold -- may bestow an advantage over unstressed peers. Like released hatchery fish have ~10% of the survival rate of wild fish.

A low methylation score could be interpreted as a call to mature a child's tissues more rapidly by the curated application of adversity.

> released hatchery fish have ~10% of the survival rate of wild fish.

Is that inclusive of the entire egg->fry->fish cycle? I wouldn't be surprised if wild fish had extremely high "infant mortality" compared to hatchery fish

That's certainly a solution.

Maybe colleges can just accept the best students and do their job of educating them instead of arrogantly appointing themselves as saviors and righters of all wrongs in the world.

In the USA, at least, "every student college bound" has led to colleges being simply more high school but at an enormous cost of creating indentured servents.

It will be very hard to to force colleges to downsize to the appropriate population count. Lots of prestige and money on the line

the size of the cohort isnt the problem, its the enshrinement of catechisms that perpetuate a mentality of blue collar legacy.

Can you explain ? I understand each word but not the meaning of the whole sentence.

It would actually be very easy. Just stop subsidizing them with student loans from the government.

Higher education is the most potent tool for breaking the cycle of poverty. Your plan would lock people into the cycle of poverty for generations.

Besides, how do you even define "best student". One that scores the highest on the SATs and has the highest high school grade? There's so much more to being a good learner than having the opportunity to get high grades and high test scores.

SAT scores are excellent predictors of success in college.

The triad top colleges look for:

1. SAT score

2. high school grades

3. evidence of being a self-motivated person

It's the opposite. Gatekeeping employment on that stupid credential is the best way to keep people in poverty.

> Maybe colleges can just accept the best students

If you want to see what a world where universities do that, check Europe in the 11th century. You might just like it

And if you want to see a world where colleges accept everyone, without requiring a minimum qualification, look at our current system: over 50% of students lack proficient literacy skills.

It shouldn’t be controversial to recognize that some students are not capable of success in college.

do you mean intrinsically not capable, or systemicaly not capable.

Intrinsically. Someone with an IQ of 85 will not be successful in college.

The idea that anyone can be anything is harmful to everyone. If you are 5’2”, you won’t make it in today’s NBA. If you are 400lbs, you are not healthy.

I’m sure some people have been failed by the K-12 educational system, but the answer isn’t to further degrade the college system.

This assumes "IQ" is fixed, but it isn't.

IQ remains relatively stable through life: that’s what makes it a good measure of general intelligence, when tested appropriately.

It’s even more predictive when you realize that the SAT/ACT are given a year or two before college: this isn’t tracking someone at age 5, but saying someone a year away from college lacks the skills and knowledge to perform well in class next year.

If schools actually consistently applied standardized test scores as part of admissions, without padding scores for race or economics, it’d be better for everyone. It might sting to be told you won’t do well in college, but wouldn’t that $100 test be better than taking on $50K in debt to find that out?

Research backs this: SAT scores strongly correlate with GPA, retention, and degree completion. High scores even are predictors of life outcomes: income, occupational achievement, medical degrees, etc.

Actually, German universities accept everyone unless there are capacity problems, but what they do is have extremely aggressive "weed out" final exams in the first two semesters.

The degrees with the lowest attrition rates tend to be the ones that are gated behind high admission requirements (e.g. minimum high school grades).

> It shouldn’t be controversial to recognize that some students are not capable of success in college.

And it shouldn't be controversial to recognize that some students did not receive the $upport needed to succeed in college. Life isn't a meritocracy.

It's not binary. Is it more of a meritocracy than other places or other times? I would say so, yes, more than most other places or most other times.

You actually think universities have anything to do with how Europe was in the 11th century?

You have it wrong. Those universities were a reflection of society just like it is today with all the affirmative action stuff.

What does "best" mean?

> Maybe colleges and scholarships that make admission decisions based on adversity can someday objectively measure it by DNA methylation. Also for reparations or welfare benefits.

> A low methylation score could be interpreted as a call to mature a child's tissues more rapidly by the curated application of adversity.

The paper didn't even find a unidirectional correlation between methylation and adversity. They say right in this article that some adversity was correlated with changes they would expect to see with slowed aging (which does not mean adversity slowed aging, it's just a marker).

Those markers are also correlated with many other factors like the size of the animal.

It's not a marker of adversity.

> The paper didn't even find a unidirectional correlation between methylation and adversity

Since when has science stopped someone who wanted to use DNA to assign someone a fixed role in society?

Gattaca (1997) - IMDb

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177

lol, you might change your mind when reparations end up going out to a very different set of people than you expected.

I am not sure if your initial paragraph was meant to be sarcastic. I do believe we should give additional help based on economic need rather than race or skin color.

Free universal preschool seems to have big impact. Also free universal school lunches are too. There may be other examples too.

Sure, many of those interventions are widely accepted. The controversial question is when do they stop?

If, despite those interventions, your ACT score is 9 points below a more affluent student, do you still deserve a boost? At 35, despite picking up a conviction for theft and possession, and now working a minimum wage job, should the taxpayers have to fund a 2 bedroom apartment for you, pay for your groceries, pay for your healthcare?

> In this study, researchers developed highly precise tissue-specific clocks, capable of predicting age within about one year of an individual's chronological age.

So if all of this adversity related difference doesn't even throw off the chronological calculation of age by more than a year, how significant is it? Certainly there could be other effects beyond just aging, but is there any evidence of the actual effect size here?

In a nutshell, is this basically "stress the part and it wears out faster"?

It’s more like “stress the part and that part will change its internal maintenance processes, with some ripple effects across multiple parts”. They didn’t even find a consistent stress=aging pattern across multiple tissues.

No, the article specifically mentions that some parts appeared to experience the opposite of accelerated aging. Presumably that means the “parts wore out more slowly”.

You might be interested in “hormesis”, a vital aspect of Life’s resilience, in which (some) stress improves a system.

My parents were born in 1949 korea and I recently realized (thru talking to AI) that that's probably why they were/are so fucked up. Basically first 4 years of their lives were surrounded by destruction, death, like Gaza right now. Then after that an upbringing in famine and authoritarianism. Body keeps the score, eh.

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