BCN Lectures

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BCN Lecture June

June 5, 2025: BCN Lecture: Aniko Korosi  (Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam)
Title: “Combatting the effects of early-life stress on brain function through nutritional interventions”
Time: 12:00 – 13:00, June 5, 2025
Online: https://meet.google.com/myu-gnsb-mit?authuser=2
Next BCN Lecture: July 3. Time 12:00 hrs. by Sinan Guloksuz

“Combatting the effects of early-life stress on brain function through nutritional interventions”

Exposure to stress during sensitive developmental periods comes with long term consequences for neurobehavioral outcomes and increases vulnerability to psychopathology including depression and Alzheimer’s disease later in life. While we have advanced our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the programming effects of early-life stress (ES), these are not yet fully understood and often hard to target, making the development of effective interventions challenging. In recent years, we have proposed that nutrition might be instrumental in modulating and possibly combatting the ES-induced increased risk to psychopathologies and neurobehavioral impairments. Nutritional strategies are very promising as they might be relatively safe, cheap and easy to implement. In fact recently, substantial evidence has become available that nutrition plays a key role in modulating various aspects of mental health, giving rise to the new emerging field of “nutritional psychiatry”. The brain has a very high, continuous metabolic rate and consumes over 20% of one’s energy and nutrient levels and heavily depends on nutrient availability and metabolism, including lipids (e.g. polyunsaturated fatty acid, PUFA ⁵), amino acids, vitamins, minerals as well as polyphenols. These nutrients impact endogenous neuropeptides, neurotransmitters as well as gut hormones, gut microbiota, all of which have been shown to be important for brain function and mental health. However nutritional strategies are not effective for everybody, and it remains unclear why some individuals respond while others do not, we lack a causal, mechanistic explanation of precisely how nutrition exerts its beneficial effect and it remains to be determined when we can best apply nutritional strategies for prevention as well as intervention.

I will discuss our work demonstrating, the key role of the neuroimmune system in the long-term impact of early-life stress and our studies showing that that ES leads to altered lipid and amino acid composition of the brain and that altered early nutritional supplementation with fatty acids, methyl-donor micronutrients and polyphenols are each able to protect against the ELA-induced cognitive decline and that these beneficial effects were at least partly mediated by their anti-inflammatory properties, highlighting the exciting possibility that nutrition could also help modulate or prevent depression related to ES and discuss the possible mechanisms involved in the beneficial effects of nutrition on the brain after ES.

Aniko Korosi: I’m a postdoc at UCI in the lab of dr. Baram (2006-2010) where I studied how enriched early life experience rewires the hypothalamus. At the end of 2010 I started my team and I am currently an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Throughout my career, I have developed a strong and highly recognized research program in the field of nutritional neuroscience. I specialized in the neurobiology of stress, and study how the brain adapts long-term when stress occurs during early developmental periods and how nutrition modulates the brain. Early-life stress (ELS) is a key risk factor for developing psychiatric disorders including mood disorders and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). My research focuses on understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the adaptation to (early)stress and the associated risks to mental illness as well as to testing the original concept that early nutritional strategies can protect against the ELS-induced deficits. My research is funded by several (inter)national programs (e.g. NWO Food Cognition and Behavior, NWO Meervoud, JPI- Nutri-Cog and Alzheimer Nederland, Horizon 2020, JPND). To conduct this research program, I perform studies across various species, including mice, fish and humans. I actively contribute to the academic community by serving in multiple national and international executive boards of the main (inter)national neuroscience societies including: executive board Dutch-Neuroscience meeting (DNM) 2012-2022; European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) 2022-2023; European Brain and Behavior Society (EBBS) treasurer/chair (2018-2023), Federation of European Neuroscience Societies treasurer (2024-present) and in the executive committee of the International society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research (ISNPR). In those capacities I organized and chaired the main national neuroscience (DNM-2020/2021), the EBBS-2023 meetings, both with >500-participants and an ECNP Nutritional psychiatry workshop in collaboration with ISNPR (2021). My mission is to perform high quality translational nutritional neuroscience research providing fundamental mechanistic evidence and translating these findings into human interventions to utilize the so far untapped potential of nutrition to protect mental and metabolic health.

BCN Lecture July

July, 2025: BCN Lecture: Sinan Guloksuz (Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Maastricht University and Specialized Treatment Early in Psychosis (STEP) Program, Yale University School of Medicine)
Title: “Exposome meets genome in shaping mental health trajectories”
Time: 12:00 – 13:00, July 3, 2025
EC: 0.2 EC for PhD students, to be added to Hora Finita by yourself
Online: https://meet.google.com/zqk-tpjj-ubw
Next BCN Lecture: September 4. Time 12:00 hrs. by Roelant Ossewaarde

“Exposome meets genome in shaping mental health trajectories”

There is active interest in understanding the relationship between neuropsychiatric disorders and modifiable and potentially preventable environmental exposures. However, the complexity of the environment, involving many causal and noncausal pathways, continues to make research challenging.  In this presentation, I will begin by introducing the exposome paradigm and discuss how it can help address this complexity, facilitating a more integrated approach to environmental and genetic research. I will also demonstrate how a cumulative environmental score, exposome score for schizophrenia, can be used for risk stratification, outcome forecasting, and enhancing clinical characterization. Subsequently, I will report agnostic exposome-wide analyses that might be the first step to mapping the exposome of mental health phenotypes. Finally, I will go beyond the state of the art by introducing the ongoing work of our group within the projects YouthGEMs, HAMLETT-OPHELIA, and MINDSET.

Dr. Sinan Guloksuz, MD, MSc, PhD is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Maastricht University and Yale School of Medicine (STEP Program). Trained in psychiatry and epidemiology, his research focuses on the interplay between genes and environment in psychosis, particularly early detection and prevention. He introduced the exposome paradigm in psychiatry and developed the exposome score for schizophrenia, a novel tool to quantify cumulative environmental risk. His work has advanced our understanding of gene-environment interactions and improved psychosis risk prediction. Dr. Guloksuz has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications and received awards from leading psychiatric organizations. He currently leads research within major EU and national projects, including Youth-GEMs and OPHELIA, aiming to transform psychiatric prevention through integrative genomic and exposomic approaches (https://guloksuz.com).