41.2 THE EFFECTS OF DEVELOPMENTAL STRESS AND TRAUMA ON THE DOPAMINE SYSTEM
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Exposure to developmental psychological stressors, adversity and trauma increases the risk of psychosis. Converging evidence indicates that developmental stress and trauma induce long-term changes in dopaminergic functioning which could give rise to a latent vulnerability to mental illness. I will therefore present a synthesis of the existent human and animal literature examining how developmental trauma and stress alters dopaminergic functioning in adulthood. In addition, I will present results of a study using positron emission tomography (PET) of dopamine synthesis capacity and the acute stress response in healthy adults exposed to developmental and adult psychosocial adversity. We conducted a systematic review of the animal and human literature using a combination of three superordinate concepts including ‘childhood’, ‘trauma’ and ‘dopamine’ terms. The PET study used [18F]-DOPA in a case-control design (n=17 per group), with one group exposed to high levels of developmental and adult psychosocial adversity and another group exposed to low levels. Acute psychological stress was induced using the Montreal Stress Task. 140 studies were included in our review. Developmental stress and trauma results in long-term, complex changes in dopaminergic function across key cognitive domains including sensitization of the striatal dopaminergic response to stressors and frontal hypodopaminergia. Divergent alterations in dopaminergic function occurred depending on the timing of developmental exposure potentially representing critical periods. Developmental stress exposure potentiates aspects of dopaminergic processing including amplifying threat-related signaling in the ventral (limbic) striatum. This may occur alongside dopaminergic blunting in the amygdala resulting in deficits in fear extinction, impairing the ability to distinguish safe from unsafe environments. In our PET experiment, within people without psychosis long-term psychosocial adversity was associated with reduced baseline dopamine synthesis capacity and de-coupling between striatal dopamine and the acute stress response. Conclusions Developmental trauma exposure is likely to be inducing latent vulnerability to psychosis by producing lasting changes in reward, threat and executive processing. Further studies are needed to investigate the precise mechanisms underlying how trauma-induced changes in dopaminergic function induce vulnerability to psychosis and, in parallel, how dopaminergic processes may confer resilience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".