Multi-omics in stress and health research: study designs that will drive the field forward

Abstract

Despite decades of stress research, there still exist substantial gaps in our understanding of how social, environmental, and biological factors interact and combine with developmental stressor exposures, cognitive appraisals of stressors, and psychosocial coping processes to shape individuals’ stress reactivity, health, and disease risk. Relatively new biological profiling approaches, called multi-omics, are helping address these issues by enabling researchers to quantify thousands of molecules from a single blood or tissue sample, thus providing a panoramic snapshot of the molecular processes occurring in an organism from a systems perspective. In this review, we summarize two types of research designs for which multi-omics approaches are best suited, and describe how these approaches can help advance our understanding of stress processes and the development, prevention, and treatment of stress-related pathologies. We first discuss incorporating multi-omics approaches into theory-rich, intensive longitudinal study designs to characterize, in high-resolution, the transition to stress-related multisystem dysfunction and disease throughout development. Next, we discuss how multi-omics approaches should be incorporated into intervention research to better understand the transition from stress-related dysfunction back to health, which can help inform novel precision medicine approaches to managing stress and fostering biopsychosocial resilience. Throughout, we provide concrete recommendations for types of studies that will help advance stress research, and translate multi-omics data into better health and health care.

Keywords:

• Life stress
• multi-omics
• development
• interventions
• health
• resilience

Disclosure statement

MPS is a cofounder and scientific advisor of Personalis, SensOmics, Qbio, January AI, Fodsel, Filtricine, Protos, RTHM, Iollo, Marble Therapeutics, Crosshair Therapeutics, and Mirvie. He is a scientific advisor for Jupiter, Neuvivo, Swaza, and Mitrix. The other authors declare no conflicts of interest with respect to this work.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of this article was supported by grant #OPR21101 from the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research/California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine. These organizations had no role in planning, writing, editing, or reviewing this article, or in deciding to submit this article for publication.

Notes on contributors

Summer Mengelkoch

Summer Mengelkoch, PhD, is a is a postdoctoral fellow in the UCLA Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research, within the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research investigates the biological mechanisms through which stress experienced across the lifespan impacts health and behavior, with a focus on understanding stress-related processes in women.

Jeffrey Gassen

Jeffrey Gassen, PhD, is a Senior Statistician and postdoctoral scholar at the UCLA-UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network (UCAAN). His research applies multivariate statistics to study how environmental and social factors—especially early life stress—impact health, psychology, and biology.

Shahar Lev-Ari

Shahar Lev-Ari, PhD, is a member and the former Chair of the Health Promotion Department at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health, who has also served as the Director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at Tel Aviv Medical Center (Ichilov Hospital) and as Section Editor for Public Health at the Journal of Clinical Medicine. His research focuses on the psychobiology of transformative experiences and the advancement of precision health promotion. Presently, he is a visiting scholar at the Snyder Lab at Stanford University.

Jenna C. Alley

Jenna C. Alley, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research broadly focuses on social determinants of health disparities in sexual and gender diverse populations.

Sophia Miryam Schüssler-Fiorenza Rose

Sophia Miryam Schüssler-Fiorenza Rose, MD, PhD, is an instructor in the Department of Genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine and a rehabilitation physician with an interest in neurorehabilitation and spinal cord injury. Her research uses large population databases and multi-omics approaches to study health effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and how ACEs, life stress experiences, and environmental pollution exposures intersect to affect health.

Michael P. Snyder

Michael P. Snyder, PhD, is Professor and Chair of Genetics and Director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine. He has conducted pioneering work in the fields of functional genomics, multi-omics, and precision medicine and uses big data approaches to elucidate and longitudinally profile systems-level disease processes, and to guide the development and implementation of precision treatment approaches for a wide variety of physical and mental health conditions.

George M. Slavich

George M. Slavich, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA and a Research Scientist at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, where he directs the UCLA Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research. He is a leading authority in the conceptualization, assessment, and management of life stress; in psychological and biological mechanisms linking stress with mental and physical health; and in systems and policies for reducing stress-related health disparities.