Showing posts with label — Walter M Chesnut (@Parsifaler) April 26. Show all posts
Showing posts with label — Walter M Chesnut (@Parsifaler) April 26. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

EPIGENETICS: Our Bodies' Way to Change the Destiny Written in Our DNA by Moshe Szyf


As stress increases, the children develop more autism, they develop more metabolic diseases, and they develop more auto-immune diseases.  And when we map the methylation state, again you see the green genes becoming red as stress increases, the red genes becoming green as stress increases, an entire rearrangement of the genome in response to stress.  So if we can program genes if we are not just the slaves to the history of our genes but they can be programmed, can we de-program them?  Because epigenetic causes can cause diseases like cancer, metabolic disease, and mental health disease.  

Cocaine addiction is a terrible situation that can lead to death and to loss of human life.  We asked the question: can we reprogram the addicted brain to make that animal non-addictive anymore?  We used a cocaine addiction model that recapitulates what happens in humans.  In humans, you're in high school, some friends suggest you use cocaine, you take cocaine, and nothing happens, months pass by, something reminds you of what happened the first time, a pusher pushes cocaine, and you become addicted.  And your life has changed.  In rats, we did the same thing.  My colleague, Gal Yadid, he trains the animals to get used to cocaine, then for one month, no cocaine.  And then he reminds them of the party when they saw the cocaine the first time via cue of the colors of the cage when they saw cocaine and they go crazy.  They will press the lever to get cocaine until they die.  We first determined that the difference between these animals is that during that time when nothing happens, there's no cocaine around, and their epigenome is rearranged.  Their genes are remarked in a different way and when the cue comes, their genome is ready to develop this addictive phenotype.  So we treated these animals with drugs that either increased DNA methylation, which was the epigenetic mark to look at, or we decreased epigenetic markings.  And we found that if we increase methylation, these animals go even crazier, they become more craving for cocaine.  But when we reduce the DNA methylation, the animals are not addicted anymore.  We have reprogrammed them.  And a fundamental difference between the epigenetic drug