When little creatures like mice experience tough times early in life, it can sometimes impact their behavior and how they feel pain.
Interestingly, researchers have discovered that these changes don’t stop with that one mouse but can actually be passed down to their children and even grandchildren.
This sheds light on a unique aspect where difficulties in early life might have more far-reaching consequences than we thought.
Once Upon a Time in a Lab With Little Mice
Researchers from various prestigious institutions in Canada and Italy decided to dive deep into understanding this phenomenon.
They worked with mice and created a challenging environment for the baby mice to see how it influenced them as they grew up.
Simply put, the baby mice were separated from their mothers and shifted to different foster moms during their first week of life, a time that’s crucial for their development.
In adults, the researchers noticed changes in the way these mice behaved and even in the way their brains worked, especially regarding how they felt and reacted to pain.
It was like the early challenges they faced left a mark on their brains.
The fascinating part was, when these mice had babies and even when those babies had babies of their own, these later generations also showed similar traits and brain changes, even though they did not go through the same early hardships.
Tracing the Painful Journey: The Genetics Behind it All
Behind this phenomenon were tiny agents in their bodies, particularly in their brains, called proteins. In our bodies and in mice, proteins do various jobs, and some of them are in charge of how we feel pain.
The experiences of the tiny mice influenced specific proteins (named ASIC1, ASIC2, and ASIC3, but let’s call them the “Pain Proteins” for simplicity), altering the way they functioned and reacted to pain situations.
This change in the “Pain Proteins” also seemed to find a way to pass along to their babies and grandbabies.
Now, let’s take a step back and understand why this is important. Imagine if our grandparents experienced hardships when they were very young.
According to this research, it’s possible that those experiences might have altered something in their bodies, which then got passed down to the next generations.
So, the experiences of our grandparents might somehow be influencing our behaviors and feelings today in a way we never realized.
A Glimmer of Hope: Can We Undo the Echoes of the Past?
The researchers didn’t stop after discovering the passing down of these changes.
They explored if there’s a way to undo this, and fortunately, they found a potential solution in a drug named amiloride.
When they gave this drug to the mice, the levels of those “Pain Proteins” reduced, and it eased their pain and altered behaviors. It was like softening the invisible scars left by the hardships faced by their ancestors.
So, what does this all mean for us humans? It gives scientists a new avenue to explore when trying to understand human behaviors, pains, and experiences.
It tells us that our pains and behaviors might not only be a result of our personal experiences but could also be influenced by the hardships faced by our ancestors.
Exploring this further might give us better insights into managing pain and understanding behaviors, considering not just the individual’s experiences but potentially looking into their family history as well.
This knowledge, while in the early stages, gives us a unique lens to peek into the intricate web where our past, genetics, and current experiences intertwine, offering a new path to explore how we can better manage and understand pain and behaviors in the future.
While this is a step forward in understanding the generational impact of early life adversities, there’s much more to explore and understand, especially when we consider translating this knowledge from mice to understanding humans, who have vastly more complex lives and experiences.
But every bit of knowledge takes us a step closer to understanding the mystifying journey of pain and behavior through generations.
And who knows, perhaps in the future, we can better understand, predict, and manage our pains and behaviors with this added lens of our ancestral past.
If you care about depression, please read studies that vegetarian diet may increase your depression risk, and Vitamin D could help reduce depression symptoms.
For more information about health, please see recent studies that ultra-processed foods may make you feel depressed, and these antioxidants could help reduce the risk of dementia.
The research findings can be found in Scientists Advances.
Follow us on Twitter for more articles about this topic.
Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
