A new study coming to us from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine suggests that your job and your mounting bills, and the general dilapidated state of the world, are not the sole source of your anxiety. It could date back way further, back to your time in the womb.
The team published its findings in the journal Cell Reports, finding that stress or infection during pregnancy may rewire the developing baby’s brain in ways that crank up the risk of adult anxiety later in life.
The researchers discovered this while studying mice, whose brains are structurally similar to those of humans, making them excellent analogs for modeling human behavior.
Your Anxiety Might Have Started Before You Were Born
Scientists simulated pregnancy stress in mice by triggering inflammation, like what a fetus might experience if its mother had a rough pregnancy. Then they sat back and watched what happened to the offspring, particularly the males, who tend to show stronger anxiety responses.
Even though the baby mice weren’t genetically predisposed to anxiety, brain scans showed hyperactivity in a specific brain region called the ventral dentate gyrus, or vDG, the part of the brain that detects red flags about an environment that could be potentially dangerous.
Only a small group of neurons in the vDG was affected, but they were lighting up like a Christmas tree. These neurons had been epigenetically reprogrammed. Basically, their DNA got a few extra software patches while in the womb that told them to treat the whole world as one significant threat.
The scientists even pinpointed thousands of sites on these neurons’ DNA where this faulty 24/7 threat detection programming got locked in. Scaling this up to humans, it could explain why some people are wired to flinch before danger even appears.
They may not be actively responding to traumas and pressures of their past, but to the inflammation triggered when they were still in the womb. The team thinks this could lead to better diagnostics and treatments for anxiety.
That is, of course, if similar results are found when this research is scaled up to people.
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