Practitioner Review: Infant mental health meets cell and molecular biology - a look to the future

A major research effort in the past two decades has begun to illuminate how experience 'gets under the skin' - that is - the cellular and molecular processes that are associated with adversity and resilience.

We selectively review three areas of this research: epigenetics, especially DNA methylation, telomere length, and inflammatory processes, and consider the implications of this work for better understanding the effects of adversity and pathways of recovery.

Because infant mental health practitioners focus on children in the earliest years of life, they are well positioned to favorably alter the developmental trajectories of children experiencing or at risk for maladaptation. In addition to helping us develop more individually effective treatments, we consider other ways in which research advances in cell and molecular biology may be especially important to infant mental health practitioners in the future.

Better understanding these processes will enhance effectiveness and potentially enlarge the scope of our practice.