Social Regulation of Human Gene Expression

I will revive this blog once my current philosophy of mathematics phase wanes. For now here's an article to which Andy Fugard kindly pointed me:

@ARTICLE{Cole2009,

author = {Steve W. Cole},

title = {Social Regulation of Human Gene Expression},

journal = {Current Directions in Psychological Science},

year = {2009},

volume = {18},

pages = {132--137},

number = {3},

abstract = {The relationship between genes and social behavior has

historically been construed as a one-way street, with genes in control.

Recent analyses have challenged this view, by discovering broad

alterations in the expression of human genes as a function of differing

socio-environmental conditions. The emerging field of social genomics

has begun to identity the types of genes subject to social regulation,

the biological signaling pathways mediating those effects, and the

genetic polymorphisms that moderate socioenvironmental influences on

human gene expression.}

}

Reporting on a recent experiment, Cole explains how

Among the 22,283 genes assayed, 209 showed systematically different levels of expression in people who reported feeling lonely and distant from others consistently over the course of 4 years. These effects did not involve a random smattering of all human genes, but focally affected three specific groups of genes. Genes supporting the early "accelerator" phase of the immune response—inflammation—were selectively up-regulated; and two groups of genes involved in the subsequent "steering" of immune responses—genes involved in responses to viral infections (particularly Type I interferons), and genes involved in the production of antibodies by B lymphocytes—were down-regulated. These results provided a molecular framework for understanding why socially isolated individuals show heightened vulnerability to inflammation-driven cardiovascular diseases (i.e., excessive nonspecific immune activity) and impaired responses to viral infections and vaccines (i.e., insufficient immune responses to specific pathogens). A major clue about the psychological pathways mediating these effects came from the observation that differential gene-expression profiles were most strongly linked to a person’s subjective sense of isolation rather than to their objective number of social contacts.

Apparently,

Several studies have shown that social influences can penetrate remarkably deeply into our bodies. The nervous system plays a key role in perceiving and responding to social stimuli, and social conditions have been found to regulate the expression of neural genes such as the nerve growth factor (NGF) gene (Sloan et al., 2007) and the glucocorticoid receptor gene (Zhang et al., 2006). More surprising is the discovery that key immune system genes are also sensitive to social conditions (Sloan et al.,2007)...One recent study of women with ovarian cancer found more than 220 genes to be selectively up-regulated in tumors from women with low levels of social support and high depressive symptoms (Lutgendorf et al., 2009).

Something to ponder is how best to tell the psychological part of this story.