Maternal epigenetic index links early neglect to later neglectful care and other psychopathological, cognitive, and bonding effects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Past experiences of maltreatment and life adversity induce DNA methylation changes in adults, but less is known about their impact on mothers' maladaptive neglectful parenting and its negative effects. We performed an epigenome-wide association study to investigate the role of DNA methylation levels in mothers with neglectful care, who were exposed to childhood maltreatment and neglect, and their current negative effects. Saliva DNA methylation was determined with the Illumina Human Methylation EPIC BeadChip v1. The individual epigenome was the input to a machine learning algorithm for trajectory inference, which assigned a specific state to each mother in the progression from healthy controls to the extreme neglect condition. A compound epigenetic maternal neglect score (EMN) was derived from 138 mothers (n = 51 in the neglectful group; n = 87 in the control non-neglectful group) having young children. Differential methylation between groups was utilized to derive the EMNs adjusted for education level, age, experimental variables, and blood cell types in saliva samples. RESULTS: (29) = 37.81; p = 0.127; RMSEA = 0.048, confirmed that EMNs link their early experience of physical neglect to current reports of psychopathological symptoms, lower cognitive status, and observed poor mother-child emotional availability. A third of the genes annotated to the CpGs that affect EMNs are related to cognitive impairment and neurodegenerative and psychopathological disorders. CONCLUSIONS: EMNs are a novel index to assess the contribution of DNA methylations as a neglected girl to later neglectful caregiving behavior and other negative effects. The evidence provided expands the possibilities for earlier interventions on the neglect condition to prevent and ameliorate the direct or indirect epigenetic impact of maternal adversities on mother-child care, helping to break the cycle of maltreatment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".