UCI gains $10 million for mental health study



UCI gains $10 million for mental health study

image0-UCI gains $10 million for mental health study

UC Irvine has been awarded a $10 million federal grant to study how a mother's patterns of caring for her infant may cause brain changes that can lead to behavioral and emotional problems during adolescence.



"By and large, mothers take good care of children but there's variability and some are better than others," she said. "We are trying to determine what is good maternal care and what makes it better."


"It appears that consistent, reproducible and complex patterns seem to contribute to resilience to stress later in life," said Baram, the lead researcher on the study.


"What we seem to see is that this changes the levels of some very important molecules that respond to how we handle stress later in life," Baram said. "This is true in both brain parts responsible for cognition, learning and memory and brain parts that are responsible for emotion."


"The beauty of it is you go from one molecule to one baby," Baram said. "You're also looking across time from a fetus to an adolescent. It really is very comprehensive in approach."

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