UNews - Dr. Gerlinde Metz

U of L research examines the impact of residential schools on biological health in the next generation

caroline.zentner — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 17:03:01 +0000

A new study from the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge provides evidence that a mother’s experience of residential school may have biological impacts on her children.

The research, published in the journal SSM Population Health, found that adult children of mothers who attended residential school had increased impairment in biological regulation compared to those whose mothers had not attended residential school.

“Most research has looked at the psychological impacts of residential school experiences on survivors and their children,” says Kat Chief Moon-Riley (BSc ’14, MSc ’17), who conducted the research for her Master of Science thesis. “As an undergraduate student in neuroscience, I noticed there was limited information published about the biological impacts of residential school on the next generation, although emerging epigenetic research in other populations suggested there could be a link.”

Chief Moon-Riley was working under the supervision of Drs. Cheryl Currie, Gerlinde Metz and Jennifer Copeland when she served as research coordinator for a study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). The study examined how social and economic stressors affect Indigenous health.

“I appreciated the opportunity to add questions that mattered to me for my MSc thesis,” says Chief Moon-Riley, a member of the Kainai First Nation. “I had two grandparents attend residential school so I learned about how it affected not only them, but my mother and her siblings, as well as their grandchildren.”

Chief Moon-Riley, who’s now a medical student at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Saskatchewan, analyzed data collected from 90 First Nations and Métis adults. Overall, 43 per cent of the sample had a mother attend residential school.

“These adults had moderate impairments in measures of biological regulation, such as increased blood pressure and inflammation, compared to those who did not have a mother attend residential school,” she says.

“The findings speak to the importance of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action,” says Currie, associate professor of public health at the U of L. “The TRC calls for acknowledging that the current state of Indigenous health in Canada is a direct result of previous Canadian government policies, including residential schools. Ms. Chief Moon-Riley’s findings underline the importance of this assertion by demonstrating how the residential school experience may get under the skin to impact health in the next generation.”

“Stressful experiences are an inevitable part of life,” says Copeland, an associate professor in kinesiology. “But repeated and chronic exposure to uncontrollable stressors, like those experienced by children in residential school, can disrupt the function of neuroendocrine, cardiovascular and immune systems, which can have long-term health consequences.”

“Our findings suggest the residential school experience may have been biologically embedded and passed to subsequent generations through epigenetic mechanisms,” says Metz, a professor of neuroscience. “But it is important to note that we did not collect blood or DNA samples, so further research would be needed to confirm this hypothesis.”

“People need to recognize the impact of residential schools on past and present generations,” says Chief Moon-Riley. “These include impacts that go beyond the mind to impact the body, not only among those who attended the schools, but later among their own children. Our findings highlight how the effects of residential school are still being felt even though the last residential schools closed in the 1990s. It’s not something people can just get over. Further research is certainly needed.”

Social enrichment boosts levels of oxytocin, new U of L research shows

caroline.zentner — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 17:06:36 +0000

Holiday get-togethers give people the chance to relax and enjoy themselves with friends and family. Such social encounters can be an antidote to stress and, on a biological level, boost levels of the bonding hormone oxytocin and even contribute to longevity.

A new study by Dr. Jamshid Faraji, a research associate in Dr. Gerlinde Metz’s lab at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, has shown that rats raised in socially enriched community settings had higher oxytocin levels and a biological age that was younger than their chronological age.

Dr. Jamshid Faraji

While both males and females benefited, the effects were more pronounced in females. The study, which was conducted in collaboration with researchers from Golestan ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Medical Sciences and Avicenna Institute of Neuroscience in Iran, was recently published in the journal eLife.

“Rats are social animals and, instead of impoverishing them by housing them individually, we used standard housing and socially enriched the animals,” says Faraji. “In our study, we housed some rats with two or three companions and others with 10 or 11 companions.”

“We found that the large community setting produced higher oxytocin levels, especially in females,” says Metz. “Social enrichment led to higher novelty seeking in a corridor task, a behavioural test for rats. It turned out that females explored this task very differently than males when they were housed socially.”

The researchers also wanted to prove that oxytocin is causally involved in mediating the effects of social enrichment so some rats received an oxytocin antagonist which inhibited oxytocin secretion.

“Rats who had received the oxytocin antagonist did not show the same exploratory behaviour,” says Faraji.

To prove a biological correlation between oxytocin and longer lifespans, the researchers looked at telomeres, which are nucleotide sequences at the end of each chromosome. Whenever a cell goes into division, the telomere shortens. So, the older a person is the shorter their telomeres.

“We thought maybe there’s a way that social support could be protective for the telomere length, because this is a marker for biological age,” says Metz. “It turns out, for females especially, that those who benefited from the socially supportive environment also had longer telomeres. They had a lower biological age index and this could indicate, indirectly, that they might have a longer lifespan ahead of them.

“In a nutshell, it’s a very straightforward study but it has a lot of implications and definitely, we have a lot of food for thought to go further. There are huge gaps in the knowledge of how oxytocin mediates these effects and that needs to be investigated.”

Many factors influence longevity and life expectancy, such as diet, nutrition and exercise. This new study points to the need for face-to-face interactions and physical contact, such as hand shaking and hugging, as necessary for human well-being and long-term health.

“Meaningful, positive social relationships are really what’s driving us and it’s where the future needs to go,” says Metz. “If we read the news, we can get really worried about the future. I think we need to trust in the power of positive social relationships and that, in the end, things will turn toward the better.”

Stress experienced by pregnant women affects long-term health of offspring

caroline.zentner — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:08:11 +0000

A new study by researchers at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge and McGill ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ provides further confirmation that stress experienced by pregnant women has a lasting impact on the health of their children.

The study, published in Nature – Scientific Reports, by Dr. Gerlinde Metz, a neuroscientist at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, in collaboration with Tony Montina, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) manager, and several graduate and undergraduate students, was completed on 32 adolescents, both male and female, born to mothers who lived through the Great Ice Storm of 1998. NMR spectroscopy done on urine samples showed higher risks of metabolic illness such as insulin resistance, diabetes and obesity later in life.

Dr. Gerlinde Metz and Tony Montina used a Bruker 700 NMR instrument to analyze urine samples for biomarkers related to disease development.

The Great Ice Storm left more than four million people without electricity, some of them for more than a month. Eastern Ontario and southern Quebec were especially hard hit. Project Ice Storm was set up by Dr. Suzanne King, a professor of psychiatry at McGill, in the aftermath of the storm to build understanding about the effects of prenatal exposure to stress on children’s development. Nearly 180 pregnant women signed up and researchers have been following their children’s development in subsequent years.

“In this study, two metabolic pathways were affected in both males and females,” says Montina. “These pathways are implicated throughout the literature and all the studies in the risk of the development of diabetes and obesity.”

While the results point to health risks for offspring later in life, Metz says that identifying risks to health is the first step to creating effective therapeutic interventions to minimize them.

“If predisposition to these diseases has been programmed through adverse experience, potentially we can mitigate this risk by beneficial experiences,” says Metz. “So, we hope that through environmental and lifestyle interventions and recommendations, we can reduce the risk of these diseases early on before they come on board."

Similar results have been shown in epigenetic studies but the benefits of studying urine samples, or even blood, saliva or hair samples, is that they can provide the same results using a noninvasive technique that’s far less expensive than epigenetic testing.

“Metabolomic downstream biomarkers that are much easier to obtain in a clinical setting, much cheaper to work with and to process and analyze, hold great potential to triage and diagnose these children who are at risk of developing disease later in life due to adverse experiences in utero or early in life,” says Montina.

The research is very timely, given climate change and the increasing incidence of natural disasters like wildfires and floods.

“We are moving towards personalized medicine and preventative medicine that can help to intervene early in a lifetime,” says Metz. “We do have adverse environments, such as pollutants in the air and water, and adverse experiences that interact with our health. We really need to push forward in understanding how the environment interacts with our health at the basic research level. We also have to take the health-care research step and try to understand, at the biomedical stream of investigation, how we can predict these diseases, diagnose them and intervene.”

Research reveals importance of social experience, especially for females

caroline.zentner — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 16:02:30 +0000

New research from the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge has shown that strong and consistent social relationships are linked to a reduced anxiety response and more exploratory behaviour among female rats — a finding that could have implications for humans because of the growing use of electronic communications.

“It is a very important finding,” says Dr. Jamshid Faraji, a research associate in Dr. Gerlinde Metz’s lab. “We, as humans, are becoming increasingly socially isolated and many of us are deprived of face-to-face visual and interactional inputs.”

He, along with researchers from Golestan ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Medical Sciences and Avicenna Institute of Neuroscience in Iran, collaborated on a study using a rat model that has shown the benefits of social experience on the brain and behaviour, and a direct transmission of those benefits from mothers to their daughters. The results were recently published inScientific Reports - Nature in an article entitled Intergenerational Sex-Specific Transmission of Maternal Social Experience.

“From a scientific perspective, we needed to find the neurohormonal correlates of social life and how that could impact our lives and, particularly, women’s lives,” says Faraji.

The researchers studied four groups of rats —males and females that lived in standard housing conditions and males and females that lived in social housing conditions. In the standard housing, two or three animals lived together while, in the social housing condition, about a dozen animals lived in a larger space.

“We found that, after three months, males and females raised in social conditions were showing unique changes in their brain structure and function, but females were showing more changes in their behaviour and brain structure compared to social males,” says Faraji. “In terms of changes in brain structure, social females were showing thicker cortexes and more density in neuronal populations.”

The researchers also wanted to know if the brain and behaviour changes they observed would also be seen in offspring, even if they weren’t raised in social housing conditions. So, all animals in the second generation were raised in standard conditions. Half of the animals had mothers that had lived in social conditions and the other half had mothers that had lived in standard conditions.

“There’s a very clear track of female lineage or mother-to-daughter pathway,” says Faraji. “Although the female offspring were not exposed to social life, they were getting all those characteristics from their social mothers.”

While there were some effects on male offspring, effects on females were more salient. They exhibited greater neural complexity, were more curious about the environment and showed reduced stress responses.

Previous research has shown females are more at risk when it comes to social isolation because of the oxytocin system, a key system that, to some extent, differentiates male and female responses to social interactions. Oxytocin, a brain chemical, has also been called the love hormone. Also, persistent social experience reduced stress hormones in social animals and their unexposed descendants. Faraji says online social interactions don’t have the same effect on the brain as face-to-face contact, which releases oxytocin, and increasing social isolation can often be linked to anxiety and depression.

“Based on my results, I would suggest that we need to encourage people to establish strong social relationships that involve face-to-face communication in consistent and constant ways,” says Faraji.

U of L doctoral student wins prestigious Brain Star Award

caroline.zentner — Thu, 24 May 2018 21:51:48 +0000

For her work in illuminating the multigenerational effects of prenatal stress, Mirela Ambeskovic has been awarded a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Brain Star award, one of 15 winners of the $1,500-award across the country.

“It was a pleasant surprise, for sure,” says Ambeskovic. “I’m honoured to have received this award and grateful for this funding and all the funding I’ve had during my studies. It has made it easier to focus on research and my studies.”

Ambeskovic (BSc ’09, BA ’11, MSc ’13), a PhD candidate in neuroscience who works in Dr. Gerlinde Metz’s lab, looked at the effects of prenatal stress on motor development in male and female rats. In the study, which was published last year in Cerebral Cortex, she compared the behaviours of animals that had experienced one generation of stress with those that had experienced four generations of stress.

“We found that multigenerational stress altered behaviour and brain lateralization in males, while improving behavioural abilities in females,” she says.

While the animals were performing a reaching task, she found that multigenerational stress shifted paw performance to favour left-handedness in males, while it had no effects on paw preference in females, showing that ancestral stress may have a protective effect for females.

“It could be that, through epigenetic mechanisms, our moms prepare us for a stressful environment that might be coming down the road, where females are programmed to cope with stressful environments more sufficiently as they will be the bearers of the future generation,” says Ambeskovic.

In the same way, males affected by ancestral stress might be better prepared to defend their territory because they are more adaptable, perhaps because they could be more prone to using both paws if needed.

“Mirela’s findings illustrate the complex consequences of stress on development,” says Metz. “Stress is primarily supposed to promote survival and to make sure that behaviour adapts to a changing environment. The brain readily responds to stress and changes its structure accordingly.”

The Brain Star Award, through the Institute Community Support Grants and Awards program of CIHR, recognizes the excellence of research done in Canada by students and trainees.

U of L establishes Office of Post-Doctoral Affairs

caroline.zentner — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 17:58:06 +0000

Post-doctoral fellows at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge will soon have a new administrative home with the establishment of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.

“We’ve had post-doctoral fellows on this campus for a number of years now,” says Dr. Robert Wood, dean of Graduate Studies and Post-Doctoral Affairs. “In the past, they were considered trainees. That changed recently with the passing of Bill 7 and now they are considered employees, creating some needs institutionally to provide further accommodation.”

Dr. Robert Wood

The U of L typically has between 35 and 50 post-docs (PDFs) on campus at any given time. Most are paid through a faculty member’s research grant but they may also be funded independently. They, along with graduate students, form the backbone of research activity at research-intensive universities like the U of L.

“Post-docs have had some difficulties in the past accessing campus services in an appropriate way and they’re becoming a larger and more important aspect of our community,” says Wood. “This office will help give some foundation to the kind of experience that we need to be able to provide to them. It’s not just about getting them here; it’s also about, once they’re here, making sure they have a stellar experience.”

Dr. Erasmus Okine

“Post-doctoral fellows are the next in line learning the trade to become an academic,” says Dr. Erasmus Okine, vice-president (research). “Top-class ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ and professors looking for positions tend to look for universities with strong post-doctoral fellows and strong graduate programs because they can recruit them into their research programs and they form the basis of the next wave of ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ in our universities.”

Woods agrees that many PDFs aspire to academic careers but adds that a growing number pursue careers in industry and non-academic organizations in the public sector. The Office of Postdoctoral Affairs will help ensure their experience and training sets them up for success in any career trajectory they choose.

Dr. Gerlinde Metz, a professor of neuroscience and a Tier 1 Board of Governors Research Chair, first came to the U of L as a post-doctoral fellow. She was funded through what was then known as the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research (now Alberta Innovates-Health Solutions) as a post-doc and then was a senior scholar from 2003 to 2015.

Dr. Gerlinde Metz

“The opportunities and facilities of the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience and the funding provided by AHFMR at that time helped me make the decision to stay at the U of L,” says Metz.

Dr. Michael Kyweriga

“Because there are so many granting agencies and different contracts for post-doctoral fellows, having the Office of Post-Doctoral Affairs will be very useful to improving the life of a post-doc,” says Dr. Michael Kyweriga, president of the U of L Post-Doctoral Association (ULPA). “We really appreciate the proactive approach Dean Robert Wood takes to ensure our post-doctoral fellowships go smoothly.”

The Office of Post-Doctoral Affairs will be housed in Research Services and supervised by Wood.

While most post-docs work in science departments, others from social sciences and humanities disciplines have also completed fellowships at the U of L.

“It’s something that I’d like to see expand across the faculties and disciplines,” says Wood.

Fostering resilience in mothers and babies following the Fort McMurray wildfire

caroline.zentner — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 15:45:27 +0000

Dr. Gerlinde Metz, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge neuroscientist, is one of a group of Canadian researchers led by Dr. David Olson at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Alberta who seek to reduce the negative effects of stress on pregnant women, newborns and their mothers following the Fort McMurray wildfire.

The research study, which was recently awarded $500,000 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, could lead to new strategies for helping people who are facing disasters in the future.

Dr. Gerlinde Metz, a U of L neuroscientist, is part of a team of researchers who want to provide relief to people affected by disasters.

“The overall purpose for the study is to ascertain whether we could apply to a large number of women a simple but effective intervention to reduce their stress and thereby improve the outcomes of their pregnancies and the health of their babies,” says Olson. “If this intervention is effective, it can be applied to people everywhere in any country who are victims of natural disasters.”

Previous studies have shown that pregnant women affected by a natural disaster tend to deliver early. The children of pregnant women experiencing a disaster are at higher risk for becoming overweight or obese, developing early onset type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

“To overcome this trauma is very difficult and will take a long time,” says Metz. “That’s why we think that, if we offer an intervention that is easy to do, it’s something that we can provide and give back to the community of Fort McMurray.”

Launched by Olson last fall, women participating in the study—177 so far—are asked to do daily online expressive writing for 15 to 20 minutes for four days. Expressive writing is a well-established technique that allows for emotional disclosure and has been shown to reduce biochemical markers of physical and immune functioning. Olson says preliminary results suggest the women in the study are very stressed.

Metz’s lab will be determining the allostatic load (AL), which is the wear and tear that accumulates in the body when exposed to repeated or chronic stress, by analyzing tissue samples such as blood, urine, hair or breast milk. Researchers can then identify which biomarkers of disease are linked to the experience of stress. Comparing the AL score before and after treatment will help the researchers determine if the expressive writing treatment has been effective.

“We want to learn how we can provide fast relief next time something like this happens, it could be a flood, a wildfire, or a tornado,” says Metz.

As part of the study, children’s neurodevelopmental outcomes, weight and metabolic health will be monitored for at least two years. An additional portion of the study will ensure that the processes and outcomes of research are shared with the community and stakeholder groups. Metz says the study results will help inform decision making among health professions, emergency disaster managers and policy makers.

CIHR grant allows researchers to dig deeper into the effects of prenatal stress

caroline.zentner — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 16:21:43 +0000

Dr. Gerlinde Metz, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge neuroscientist, and her team of researchers have received more than $1.1 million in funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to conduct further research into prenatal stress and examine the role of fathers’ stress in preterm birth and newborn development.

Research evidence suggests prenatal stress is linked to adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as preterm birth, and that the negative consequences from prenatal stress can be passed from one generation to another.

Dr. Gerlinde Metz, at left, works with a student in the lab at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience. The CIHR funding will allow the research team to further study the effects of prenatal stress.

“This research funding will help us get closer to answers about the effects of prenatal stress and identify treatments that can improve and even reverse preterm birth risk,” says Metz. “About 15 million preterm babies are born every year and they can face increased health risks throughout their lives. This is a significant issue around the world.”

Metz, along with Dr. Igor Kovalchuk, a U of L biology professor, and Dr. David Olson, an obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics and physiology professor at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Alberta, will take a neuroscience approach and use three separate rat models of prenatal stress. They’ll study the effects of generational stress on offspring when only fathers are stressed, when only mothers are stressed, and when both mothers and fathers are stressed.

“We will identify mechanisms involved in how the brain translates stress to alter pregnancy health and identify markers of prenatal stress that translate to future human studies of risk assessment,” says Metz.

The researchers will also study the mitigating effects of enriched environments and drug treatments. Previous research has shown that enriched environments have reduced stress responses. The researchers hypothesize that the use of enriched environments will reverse stress markers, normalize pregnancy outcomes and lessen the negative behavioural and developmental outcomes.

“Our goal is to develop new treatments that promote healthy futures for our children and next generations,” says Metz.

Researchers show prenatal stress influences new behavioural traits, including handedness

caroline.zentner — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 17:41:22 +0000

A new study by researchers at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, recently published in Cerebral Cortex, shows the effects of prenatal stress accumulate across generations and can affect behavioural traits, such as right- and left-handedness.

Mirela Ambeskovic, a PhD candidate working in the laboratory of Dr. Gerlinde Metz, was the lead author in a study that examined the effects of prenatal stress over four generations of rats.

Mirela Ambeskovic

“Our original idea was just to test the effects of prenatal stress on motor development to see if it affects males and females differently and whether one generation of stress would have a different effect than four generations of stress,” says Ambeskovic. “But while I was testing my animals’ fine motor skills in a reaching task, I noticed something interesting.”

Ambeskovic found that males who were in the multigenerational stress group were predominantly left-pawed, while females in the same group were both left- and right-pawed. In comparison, males whose ancestors were only exposed to stress once, either in their mothers or their great-great-grandmothers, did not show a significant increase in being left-pawed.

She and Metz, a neuroscience professor, went through previous research and found no conclusive evidence of a genetic link to handedness.

“We thought maybe it’s an epigenetic effect because these animals have been stressed and epigenetically programmed across generations,” says Ambeskovic. “We did see a difference in behaviour so the stress had negative effects on fine motor skills in males and it actually had positive effects in females. Our females were better at the reaching task than the control group which had experienced no stress.”

With the help of Dr. Bryan Kolb, also a neuroscience professor, they examined the neural structure of the brains of these male rats. The researchers found their right hemispheres — which are linked to the left paw — showed increased complexity and spine density, or more connections, in their neurons.

Dr. Gerlinde Metz

“Ancestral stress often affects males more than females,” says Ambeskovic. “It affects their behaviour and it also changes their brain organization, so we see the structural changes in the neurons and their spine density.”

Researchers don’t know what comes first, paw preference or a dominant right brain hemisphere but even so, such changes should be adaptive. Ambeskovic says ancestral stress may have a protective effect for females.

“It could be that, through epigenetics, our moms prepare us for a stressful environment that might be coming down the road and it’s more important for females to know how to cope with it as they will be the bearers of the future generation,” says Ambeskovic.

“There have been studies, that for programming across generations, there’s an increase in behavioural flexibility, especially in the males. That’s what we’re seeing here. There’s more flexibility to do more tasks,” says Metz.

Ambeskovic is also looking at the effects of multigenerational stress and aging. She has found that males exposed to multigenerational stress are more susceptible to chronic diseases as they age. This study, and others, show the brain can be changed by experience and this could help pave the way to developing interventions that could change the brain in beneficial ways earlier in life.

UNews - Dr. Gerlinde Metz

U of L research examines the impact of residential schools on biological health in the next generation

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Stress experienced by pregnant women affects long-term health of offspring

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