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MINI REVIEW article

Front. Endocrinol.
Sec. Cardiovascular Endocrinology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fendo.2024.1481923
This article is part of the Research Topic Hypertension in Obese Women: Gender-Specific Challenges and Solutions View all 5 articles

The Adipose Tissue Keeps the Score: Priming of the Adrenal-Adipose Tissue Axis by Early Life Stress Predisposes Women to Obesity and Cardiometabolic Risk

Provisionally accepted
Analia S. Loria Analia S. Loria 1,2*Meghan Turner Meghan Turner 2
  • 1 University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, United States
  • 2 Department of Pharmacology and Nutritional Sciences, College of Medicine, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) refer to early life stress events, including abuse, neglect, and other psychosocial childhood traumas that can have long-lasting effects on a wide range of physiological functions. ACEs provoke sex-specific effects, whereas women have been shown to display a strong positive correlation with obesity and cardiometabolic disease. Notably, rodent models of chronic behavioral stress during postnatal life recapitulate several effects of ACEs in a sex-specific fashion. In this review, we will discuss the potential mechanisms uncovered by models of early life stress that may explain the greater susceptibility of females to obesity and metabolic risk compared with their male counterparts. We highlight the early life stress-induced neuroendocrine shaping of the adrenal-adipose tissue axis as a primary event conferring sexdependent heightened sensitivity to obesity.

    Keywords: Adverse childhood experience, sex differences, Obesity, Aldosterone, HPA axis

    Received: 16 Aug 2024; Accepted: 26 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Loria and Turner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Analia S. Loria, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.