PhD seminar – Aniko Korosi

Friday 6 March at 11:30

Venue: Centre Broca

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Dr. Aniko Korosi
Univ. Amsterdam, Netherlands

Invited by Carolina Nabais (Neurocentre Magendie)

Title

Combatting the effects of early-life stress on brain function through nutritional interventions

Abstract

Exposure to stress during sensitive developmental periods comes with long term consequences for neurobehavioral outcomes and increases vulnerability to psychopathology including depression and Alzheimer’s disease later in life. While we have advanced our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the programming effects of early-life stress (ES), these are not yet fully understood and often hard to target, making the development of effective interventions challenging. In recent years, we have proposed that nutrition might be instrumental in modulating and possibly combatting the ES-induced increased risk to psychopathologies and neurobehavioral impairments. Nutritional strategies are very promising as they might be relatively safe, cheap and easy to implement. In fact recently, substantial evidence has become available that nutrition plays a key role in modulating various aspects of mental health, giving rise to the new emerging field of “nutritional psychiatry”. The brain has a very high, continuous metabolic rate and consumes over 20% of one’s energy and nutrient levels and heavily depends on nutrient availability and metabolism, including lipids (e.g. polyunsaturated fatty acid, PUFA 5), amino acids, vitamins, minerals as well as polyphenols. These nutrients impact endogenous neuropeptides, neurotransmitters as well as gut hormones, gut microbiota, all of which have been shown to be important for brain function and mental health. However nutritional strategies are not effective for everybody, and it remains unclear why some individuals respond while others do not, we lack a causal, mechanistic explanation of precisely how nutrition exerts its beneficial effect and it remains to be determined when we can best apply nutritional strategies for prevention as well as intervention.
I will discuss our work demonstrating, the key role of the neuroimmune system in the long-term impact of early-life stress and our studies showing that that ES leads to altered lipid and amino acid composition of the brain and that altered early nutritional supplementation with fatty acids, methyl-donor micronutrients and polyphenols are each able to protect against the ELA-induced cognitive decline and that these beneficial effects were at least partly mediated by their anti-inflammatory properties, highlighting the exciting possibility that nutrition could also help modulate or prevent depression related to ES and discuss the possible mechanisms involved in the beneficial effects of nutrition on the brain after ES.

 

Meet the speaker!

You are a research staff ? Write to Julia Goncalves who will organize the schedule.

You are a PhD student? You can register to share some pizza after the talk. Registrations are open.

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PhD seminars are organized by the NBA, Bordeaux Neurocampus, and the Bordeaux Neurocampus Graduate Program.