Oct 18, 2025
3 min read
Experiencing severe adversity in childhood can have lasting effects.A better understanding of this could lead to more effective treatments
Those who feel the stressfulness than life as a budgets in their budgets in their body regularly to think of the physical life regularly.What more, drugs to watch these protein to a day to help reduce these results.
About 1 in 5 U.S. youth experienced at least four traumatic events during their childhood, such as abuse, neglect, homelessness, or the death of a parent.Research shows they can affect brain development and increase the risk of mental health conditions such as depression in adults.
"We still don't really understand the mechanisms by which adversity or stress experienced at an early age can have such long-lasting effects," says Christoph Anacker of Columbia University in New York."People who have experienced childhood trauma also tend to be less responsive to currently available antidepressants."
Early research shows that people with high levels of the protein sgk1, or serum glucocorticoid-regulated kinase 1, in their blood.It is not known about this damage, although it seems to attract the practice of making and telling information.
To better understand its impact, Anacker and colleagues analyzed SGK1 in the brains of 50 men after they died, 36 of whom died by suicide.All men had completed a survey before the age of 16 about whether they had experienced physical or sexual abuse.
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The researchers found that in the hippocampus-an area of the brain with the most anxiety in people who did not compete in childhood.
In another part of the study, the team looked at more than 8,500 children between the ages of 9 and 10 and found that children diagnosed with depression were more likely to show increased activity in the genes that code for SGK1, and that this increased activity was also associated with childhood problems.
Finally, the researchers injected 10 adult male mice with an experimental drug that blocks SGK1 every day for 10 days.30 minutes after each dose, the animals were placed inside a cage with an aggressive mouse for 5 minutes, which increased the level of stress.
At the end of 10 days, the injected mice showed fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression than a separate group of mice that were exposed to an aggressive animal after being injected with salt water.For example, the first mice spent, on average, more than twice as much time as control animals in the center of an empty cage, rather than stuck in a corner.
"When we reduce the levels of SGK1 in this brain region, the hippocampus, the mice are more sensitive to the effects of stress," says AACEAKER.A similar pathway appears to be seen in humans, so targeting SGK1 may help alleviate depression in people who experience adversity early in life.It's not clear how bad SGK1 might be, but one explanation is that it affects the hippocampus in the brain.prevents cell formation.
The drug used in this study is not approved for use in humans, but other SGK1 inhibitors are in clinical trials for certain heart diseases.If they prove safe, they could be used to treat mental illness, says Anacker.Still, “this kind of basic research in rodents is still many, many steps away from the evidence that would be needed to say that we have [a] drug target.”viable in humans,” says Katie McLaughlin from Harvard University.
Need a listening ear? British Samaritans: 116123; US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1 800 273 8255; Numbers for other countries.
Molecular Psychiatry DOI: 10.1038/s41380-025-03269-6
