There is a dearth of evidence in humans definitively showing that stress confined to the prenatal-infancy period has programming-like effects on the immune system. In addition, human studies of immune correlates of adverse childhood conditions have not focused specifically T-cell phenotypes involved in immune regulation that may compromise the ability to respond to infection. Both of these gaps in the literature are highly significant in that they limit our ability to understand the mechanisms through which early life stress (ELS) impairs health across the life span. This R21 addresses these lacunae by conducting sophisticated immunophenotyping and functional immune assays in a unique population of youth (14 through 17 years of age) who as infants (< 36 months) were adopted from orphanages/institutions in Russia/Eastern Europe into well-resourced and generally stable, low-life-stress families in the US. The early life stress (ELS) for these youth, thus, was confined to the prenatal-infancy period. There are two aims.
Aim 1 : Determine the impact of ELS on immune responses of these youth now that they are adolescents. Blood samples will be obtained from 30 post-institutionalized (PI) and 30 comparison adolescents. Sophisticated multi-color immunophenotyping will be used to characterize lymphocyte subsets and mononuclear cell responses will be probed in vitro with stimulants, and cytokine levels in supernatants determined with multi-cytokine arrays. Complete blood counts and C-reactive protein levels also will be determined. Saliva cortisol collected at testing will assess whether transient cortisol elevations in response to blood sampling contribute to the immune differences between groups.
Aim 2. Delineate factors that account for differential vulnerability among ELS youth, including distorted hormone biorhythms and severity of the ELS. The second phase of this project will expand the sample size to include 30 additional PI's (total=60), providing sufficient diversity to determine the influence of the severity and duration of institutional care and the mediating influence of dysregulated HPA diurnal rhythms to predict variation in the T cell repertoire and cellular responses in stimulated cultures. This work is highly significant because, by focusing on youth who experience radical improvements in care post-infancy, it will provide the strongest evidence to date of prenatal-infancy programming-like effects on the human immune system and underscores the importance of preventing early deprivation and neglect. It also has potential significance for improving the preventive care of individuals with a history of early adverse care, by delineating specific immune alterations that may underlie potential health risks later in adulthood. It is highly innovative in being the first study of ELS in humans to employ such a sophisticated immune panel and to combine measures that are integral to a pro-inflammatory bias and immune competence. This R21 project will lay the groundwork for a new avenue of ELS-immune research that is focused on lingering sequelae of childhood experiences.
Early life stress (ELS) has life-long impacts on health, is a major public health concern, and may be an especially significant issue for American families who adopted children from foreign countries. Based on preliminary findings indicating that adolescents who spent the first 1-3 years in orphanages continue to show signs of immune dysregulation, our project will employ state-of-the art immunophenotyping and cell stimulation to more systematically delineate the extent of their T cell abnormalities. The primary aim is to link this immune assessment with our prior evidence indicating these teenagers also manifest altered pituitary-adrenal activity and daily cortisol rhythms, which underscores the importance of learning more about the formative impact of early life events in order to better target interventions to promote resilience and recovery.
