Research Aim

Early life is a sensitive period of development. When this period is disturbed by exposure to childhood adversity, it can have a lasting impact on the adult we become, on mental and physical health, increasing the vulnerability to develop a large range of disorders (e.g. depression, cognitive decline and obesity). Because prevention of early-life stress is often difficult, a better understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the early programming of the brain, behavior and body is needed.

Our work

We study the effects of early-life stress in the context of wild type, but also Alzheimer mouse models. We have recently found that exposure to early-life stress is associated with impaired learning and memory, altered neuroimmune system, altered responses to amyloid and altered fat and leptin system.

Importantly, we have recently identified early nutritional interventions with essential PUFAs or with methyl donor micronutrients, that were able to protect against some of the detrimental effects of early-life stress exposure. The exact mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of such diet, and whether this could be considered also in the context of Alzheimer’s disease, are among our current research interests.

The main goal of our research group is to better understand the biological mechanisms and environmental factors involved in brain programming by stressful early-life experiences and to test the efficacy of nutritional interventions. We focus on essential nutrients and early dietary interventions in particular. The translational value of this approach is high as nutrition is typically non-invasive, cheap and easily applicable.

We aim to identify how the various components of the early-life environment, including stress-hormones, early nutrition and inflammatory modulators act synergistically in programming the brain and body.

We study these aspects across species, in mice, humans and fish.

Mice

We use wild type as well as transgenic mice (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease mouse model) and an established mouse model of early-life stress. We study if and how early-life stress-induces alterations in brain structure and function and metabolic characteristics under a basal state or after various challenges (e.g. immune challenge, or metabolic challenges) and study in detail the involvement of various cell types of the brain (neurons, astrocytes, microglia), in vivo and in vitro. Within the brain, our main focuses are on the hippocampus and hypothalamus, very plastic brain regions involved in learning and memory, in stress regulation and energy homeostasis, and focus on various forms of brain plasticity, related to hippocampal neurogenesis, microglia and astrocytes.

Human

We have set up the Amsterdam mother milk cohort (AMS) to study the effects of stress on the composition of human breastmilk, in collaboration with Prof Hans van Goudoever (AUMC).

We work in collaboration with AUMC (Dr. S. de Rooij) on the Dutch Famine birth cohort and ABCD cohorts to understand the biological characteristics (lipid and immune profile) of blood, aimed at understanding mechanisms and possibly identifying biomarkers of early stress exposur

Fish

Work in collaboration with WUR (Dr. B. Pollux) on novel placental fish species to study the evolution of maternal effects on theffspring.

Heterandria formosa