Michael J. Meaney, CM, CQ, FRSC, (born 1951) is a professor at

McGill University McGill University (French: Université McGill) is an English-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill University, Vol. I. For the Advancement of Learning, ...

specializing in

biological psychiatry Biological psychiatry or biopsychiatry is an approach to psychiatry that aims to understand mental disorder in terms of the biology, biological function of the nervous system. It is interdisciplinary in its approach and draws on sciences such as ...

neurology Neurology (from , "string, nerve" and the suffix wikt:-logia, -logia, "study of") is the branch of specialty (medicine) , medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the nervous syst ...

, and

neurosurgery Neurosurgery or neurological surgery, known in common parlance as brain surgery, is the specialty (medicine), medical specialty that focuses on the surgical treatment or rehabilitation of disorders which affect any portion of the nervous system ...

, who is primarily known for his research on stress, maternal care, and

gene expression Gene expression is the process (including its Regulation of gene expression, regulation) by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product that enables it to produce end products, proteins or non-coding RNA, ...

. His research team has "discovered the importance of maternal care in modifying the expression of genes that regulate behavioral and neuroendocrine responses to stress, as well as hippocampal synaptic development" in animal studies. The research has implications for domestic and public policy for maternal support and its role in human disease prevention and economic health. Meaney is associate director of the Research Centre at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, director of the Program for the Study of Behaviour, Genes and Environment, and James McGill Professor, Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology and Neurosurgery,

. He was named a "Most Highly Cited Scientist" in the area of neuroscience by the Institute for Scientific Information in 2007 and was also elected to the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; , SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bilingual council of distinguishe ...

and named a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. For research on stress he has received a Senior Scientist Career Award from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in 1997. He also, along with fellow researcher from the Douglas Institute Dr. Gustavo Turecki, was awarded the Scientist of the Year Award by

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. In 2011, he was made a member of the

Order of Canada The Order of Canada () is a Canadian state order, national order and the second-highest Award, honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, after the Order of Merit. To coincide with the Canadian Centennial, ce ...

Animal studies

Meaney is an expert in stress and epigenetics, with hundreds of papers and thousands of citations culminating in a

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with success indicators such as winning t ...

of 135 as of 2019. Meaney has studied the epigenetic effects of stressors ranging from aversive early life experience to obesity. His early research focused on the relationship between maternal care and stress response in rat pups. This work demonstrated that pups removed from their maternal environment and handled for 15 minutes per day had lower hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal responses than pups separated from their mothers for 3 hours per day and pups with no handling whatsoever. Meaney hypothesized that these changes were related to

glucocorticoid receptor The glucocorticoid receptor (GR or GCR) also known by its gene name ''NR3C1'' ( nuclear receptor subfamily 3, group C, member 1) is the steroid receptor for glucocorticoids such as cortisol. The GR is expressed in almost every cell in the bod ...

density and its role in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis feedback. Meaney and colleagues tested his hypothesis by examining the effect of maternal care on GR expression. They separated mother rats into two groups: high licking and grooming mothers and low licking and grooming mothers. Pups of high licking and grooming mothers had a significantly greater density of glucocorticoid receptors in their hippocampi than pups of low licking and grooming mothers. This research was the first to establish a causational relationship between maternal care and behavioral epigenetic programming by cross fostering pups. Meaney also studied this causal relationship between maternal care and epigenetic programming in estrogen receptor expression in the medial pre-optic area of the brain. The behavioral results showed that high licking and grooming mothers birth pups that grow to be high licking and grooming mothers, even with cross fostering. Meaney's animal research and hypotheses are broadly applicable, showing similar results when applied to humans.

Human studies

Meaney’s early research provided impetus for applied behavioral epigenetic research in humans. His first study compared suicidal subjects with a history of child abuse to suicidal subjects without a history of child abuse. Meaney found further evidence to support his hippocampal glucocorticoid receptor hypothesis when he discovered that abuse victims had less expression of hippocampal glucocorticoid receptors than both non-abused suicide victims and non-suicidal subjects. This suggests that childhood abuse alters the hippocampus in a way that is related to suicidal behavior.

Publications

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Books

References

External links