Leveraging Early life Experiences to Drive Adaptive Brain Development

Early life experiences profoundly influence the development of neural circuitry involved in emotional control. Adverse environments are particularly detrimental, increasing psychiatric disease risk nearly three-fold. Unfortunately, effective treatments remain limited, and most treatments confer only short-term relief of symptoms, particularly for pediatric populations. My laboratory has been examining whether early intervention during adolescence may reduce the longevity and severity of psychopathology. Our work considers how the adolescent brain itself may be leveraged to re-route trajectories of brain development. We have found that pairing acute stress with explicit safety learning during adolescence mitigates the detrimental impacts of aversive experience for fear extinction in adulthood. Ongoing research is using functional ensemble tagging techniques in populations of corticohippocampal neurons to explore whether engaging safety ensembles across adolescence may prime the adult brain for enhanced fear regulation. This work indicates a peri-adolescent period ripe for intervention.