If you knew what stressors could develop into psychiatric disorders in humans, would you care to find out? Better yet, are you confined to your stressful environment or are there ways to adapt and persevere? Nikolaos Daskalakis, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Leiden University, may be able to tell you just how detrimental early life adversity can be on mental health and has possibly offered a solution to tackling early life stressors. Dr. Daskalakis' research focuses on the interaction between stress and the brain in health and disease. Turns out rat pups are great model organisms to understand stress systems in humans. It has been shown that rat pups deprived of maternal care could be used to study the underlying mechanism of CORT-enhanced vulnerabilities--disorders due to an induced stress response--such as depression. When you are stressed, you release corticosterone (CORT) as well as adrenocorticotropin (ACTH) hormone. These two hormones are the basis ...