Montrealers try to reverse brain damage caused by childhood abuse - is it possible?

   Here is a bit of good news: if you're oppressed by bad experiences you suffered in childhood, you're not just complaining for nothing, you're simply recognizing a very real, physical disability that you've been forced to live with.
   These Montrealers pictured above are part of a team studying epigenetics of the brain. We are born with our genes and those are the puppet strings that control much of who you are. But certain experiences can change the chemical composition of those genes. More specifically, genes are surrounded by a coating of methylation which can be damaged by stress. These brain experts from the Douglas Hospital in Verdun, along with a team of McGill students determined last year that certain types of stress suffered in childhood can cause unusual response in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal function. Specifically, they learned that people who committed suicide after suffering abuse as children had brains in their craniums that were physically altered due to the stresses of that harmful experience.
   They dug into 36 brains, one third of which were from samples from people who killed themselves after suffering abuse. The brains were not labelled, so as with all good university experiments, the study complied with the gold standard of research. The brains were obtained from the Quebec Suicide Brain Bank. Hopefully nobody reading Coolopolis will ever make a deposit at that bank.
  So now that science is armed with proof of how brains are physically damaged by childhood trauma, the next step in epigenetic brain research is to devise a method to reverse the damage. That would wipe up a lot of suffering among those who were victimized as children.