Opendak Maya
Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, MD, 21205, USA.
Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, 21205, USA.
Neurobiol Stress. 2025 Apr 8;36:100725. doi: 10.1016/j.ynstr.2025.100725. eCollection 2025 May.
Disrupted social behavior is a fundamental indicator of compromised mental health, such as anxiety and depression, and serves as an early diagnostic marker for disorders that can develop later in life. However, our understanding of how the neural circuits for social behavior develop and how environmental disturbances at various developmental stages affect infant behavior is limited. Through my research with rats, I have established a foundation for identifying specific neuroanatomical circuits in infants that produce age-appropriate social behavior and how these systems may change in response to adversity. Overall, these studies have helped generate technical and conceptual advances in our understanding of social development and early life stress. These studies have employed multiple levels of analysis and functional brain dissection to identify novel targets of early social stress and measure how the infant brain responds to social information in typical and perturbed development.
社会行为紊乱是心理健康受损的一个基本指标，如焦虑和抑郁，并且是那些可能在生命后期发展的疾病的早期诊断标志物。然而，我们对于社会行为的神经回路如何发育以及不同发育阶段的环境干扰如何影响婴儿行为的理解是有限的。通过我对大鼠的研究，我已经为识别婴儿中产生适合其年龄的社会行为的特定神经解剖回路以及这些系统如何因应逆境而变化奠定了基础。总体而言，这些研究有助于在我们对社会发展和早期生活压力的理解方面取得技术和概念上的进展。这些研究采用了多层次分析和功能性脑剖析来识别早期社会压力的新靶点，并测量婴儿大脑在典型和受干扰的发育过程中对社会信息的反应。
