At the Mass General Research Institute, our community of 9,500+ investigators work diligently to publish peer-reviewed work and scientific findings to better understand disease and develop solutions to medicine’s most pressing challenges.

Footnotes in Science is a space where investigators bring you the behind-the-scenes details of their recently published work.

In this Q&A, we pick the brain of Erin C Dunn, ScD, MPH, regarding her team’s latest research article published in Oxford University Press, Socioeconomic changes predict genome-wide DNA methylation in childhood.

Dr. Dunn is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist with expertise in genetics and epigenetics.

Her research team focuses on using interdisciplinary approaches to better understand the social and biological factors that influence the risk for depression among women, children, and adolescents.

What motivated you and your team to publish this study?

From decades of research studies, scientists have learned that the socioeconomic position (SEP) you’re born into and raised in is a critical determinant of lifelong physical and mental health.

Although these relationships are well established, little is known about exactly how this relationship occurs. In other words, what does your socioeconomic position do biologically to shape your health?

Our research team studies DNA methylation (DNAm), which is a type of epigenetic modification that occurs to your genome. Epigenetic modifications do not change the sequence or alphabet of your DNA sequence but change how your genes function.

In undertaking this study, we wanted to know if early life SEP shaped these DNAm signatures.

Further, we wanted to know how the timing, duration, and upwards/downwards mobility of SEP – meaning, more rapid fluctuations in SEP over time – might influence epigenome-wide DNAm profiles.

Can you expand more on the SEP indicators: what are they and how they contributed to structure your study? 

We analyzed six indicators of socioeconomic position (SEP) that could impact children and their caregiving environments. These indicators spanned financial, occupational and residential domains:
1) parent job loss
2) parent income reduction
3) low family income
4) household financial hardship
5) major financial problem in the family and
6) neighborhood disadvantage.

Each of these SEP indicators were measured multiple times across childhood (from birth to age 7).

By having repeated measures of these indicators, we could investigate how their changes over might influence epigenetic pathways. Thanks to these repeated measures, we could also investigate whether there are “sensitive periods” for the effects of SEP on DNA methylation, meaning specific ages when SEP might have larger impacts on biological processes.

What are the biggest takeaways from this study?

The main finding of this study was that experiencing socioeconomic changes, especially worsening neighborhood quality or parental job loss during ages 6-7 years (middle childhood), was associated with the greatest DNA methylation differences in children.

These findings also underscore what we already know: that children’s early life experiences can shape their biology. Here we specifically learned that early-life socioeconomic adversity can leave biological memories in the epigenome.  

What are the next steps in your research?

As a next step, we are working to reproduce these findings to determine whether the effects of SEP on DNAm persist in other datasets and across more diverse populations.

We are also investigating the extent to which epigenetic alterations in childhood persist later in adolescence or adulthood, as well as determining which health outcomes are predicted by these epigenetic alterations.   

What interventions, programming or campaigns would you like government officials to implement?

Our findings suggest at least two paths forward for prevention and intervention.

First, our results suggest that children and families might benefit from policies and social programs aimed at minimizing socioeconomic instability, especially for lower-income families who may lack a safety-net to draw from during times of transition, such as job loss.

Second, prevention programs aimed at promoting socioeconomic stability during childhood might benefit from adopting a multisystemic approach that considers the social determinants of health at the household, neighborhood, and societal level.

At the household-level, parent-child interventions that promote supportive parenting styles or social cohesion during times of instability and/or heightened parental stress may help to foster resiliency in children.

At the neighborhood-level, after-school programs, community recreational centers, or other community-based interventions that provide added support/routine to children’s environments might be particularly beneficial to children whose families are experiencing socioeconomic instability.