Bart Rutten - Biological underpinnings of resilience and risk to the effects of psychological trauma on mental health.

 

Biography:
Bart Rutten is an academic psychiatrist with a prime research focus on gene-environment interplay and epigenetics in the onset and course of mental disorders. He is professor of Psychiatry and of Neuroscience of Mental Illness within the School for Mental Health and Neuroscience, and he chairs the Department of Psychiatry & Neuropsychology.

Research: driven by his combined background and activities as clinical psychiatrist and neuroscientist, Bart and his team perform translational and multidisciplinary research projects on gene-environment interactions and neuroepigenetics in relation to mental health and illness. The research approach encompasses the translational innovation cycle and is characterized by combining human observational studies (longitudinal epidemiological cohorts as well as post-mortem brain studies) with molecular biological analyses and with in-vivo and ex-vivo experimental animal and in vitro (cell culture) studies. For doing so, Bart Rutten drives and coordinates several multinational research projects focussing on gene-environmental interactions, involving the world’s largest project on gene-environment interactions in schizophrenia and the first longitudinal, genome-wide studies on epigenetic changes in relation to risk and resilience to the effects of traumatic stress on mental health. His team has furthermore taken important steps in establishing i) links between epigenetic mechanisms on the central nervous system and dietary and social influences in dementia, and ii) how epigenetic mechanisms may regulate susceptibility to develop mental ill-health after exposure to several environmental factors (including psychological trauma) across the life span. His research has revealed biological underpinnings of differential susceptibility to the impact of environmental stressors on mental health, in relation to psychosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and dementia, and his results have had considerable impact on the scientific community and clinical psychiatry. Bart is an active member and driver of local regional, international and transatlantic collaborative networks on his themes.

For the support of his research, Bart has received grants from the Netherlands Scientific Organisation, i.e. personal grants, a VENI award and VIDI award on “neuroepigenetics and resilience” as well as an institutional grant for the NWO Graduate School of Translational Neuroscience subsidising four PhD projects, and from the European Union (EU) for the international, large collaborative project EU-GEI, the European Network of national network studying gene-environment interaction in schizophrenia; www.eu-gei.eu, and two Marie-Curie grants (from the EU).  

Career: Bart studied medicine at Maastricht University and at the Catholic University in Louvain (Belgium). During his MD and PhD period, he performed research at RWTH University in Aachen, the University of California at San Francisco, Emory University and at Maastricht University. He obtained his PhD degree on the topic of “Mechanisms of neuronal loss in ageing and Alzheimer’s disease”. From 2004, he followed the academic residency training program for the medical specialization in Psychiatry. From 2009 onwards, Bart Rutten has been active as a certified clinical psychiatrist, combining his clinical activities with teaching, management and particularly research on translational psychiatry and neuroscience (see above). From 2013 – 2017, Bart Rutten led the division of Neuroscience within the school for Mental Health and Neuroscience and was local representative at the European Graduate School for Neuroscience (EURON). Since 2017 till present, Bart has become the chair of the department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology at Maastricht UMC+, and has co-directed the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) at Maastricht University.
Publications: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

 

Abstract:
Exposure to psychological trauma is one of the most important and prevalent risk factors for mental and physical ill-health. While exposure to psychological trauma occurs in a large proportion of the general population, the majority of individuals does not develop over signs or symptoms of ill-health, suggesting strong inter-individual differences in trauma susceptibility. The biological mechanisms underlying this differential susceptibility are largely unknown, albeit that genetic and epigenetic variations have been proposed to moderate (and mediate) the relationship between exposure to traumatic stress and the susceptibility to develop mental ill-health. The current presentation will have a primary emphasis on studies on epigenetic mediation of the impact of psychological trauma, whereas our studies on gene-environment interactions are presented elsewhere during the MHeNs day. Epigenetic mechanisms refer to environmentally sensitive modifications to DNA and RNA molecules that regulate gene transcription without altering the genetic sequence itself.  Bart’s presentation will highlight the developments and key results of his work on studying epigenetic and other biological processes linked to the differential susceptibility to the influence of traumatic stress on mental health. This research comprises studies in high-risk groups (such as military soldiers) as well as general population cohorts, experimental animal studies and first (preliminary) data from human neural cell models. An outlook into the future as well as critical reflection on these findings and their relevance for our biopsychosocial understanding of health and illness in a lifespan perspective will also be provided. Taken together, this line of research aims to forge i) a better understanding on how biology may modulate the impact of trauma on health, ii) de-stigmatization of people with trauma-related mental and somatic distress and ill-health, iii) identification of markers of trajectories of risk and resilience, and v) identification of actionable biological targets.