January 24, 2020 – Naguib Mechawar – Early-life adversity and its long-term influence on cerebral oligodendrocytes and myelination

Early-life adversity can have devastating and lasting consequences on individuals, considerably increasing the lifetime risk of negative mental health outcomes such as depression and suicide. Yet, the neurobiological processes underlying this increase in vulnerability remain poorly understood. I will present some of our recent work, conducted with well-characterized post-mortem brain samples, indicating that child abuse, in part through epigenetic reprogramming of oligodendrocytes, may lastingly disrupt cortical myelination, a fundamental feature of cerebral connectivity.