the environment of today is not conducive to evolutionary survival, and because of that, specific events or traumas that occur can essentially switch on anxiety genes and genes that drive other illnesses simply because the modern way of life is not something humans are equipped to handle.
professor mackenzie even goes so far as to say that most people should have some sort of chronic disease in today’s environment, and the people who don’t should be examined for answers.
“i think the most interesting component of our society aren’t the people who get obese because we live in an environment that’s hyper-calorific. it’s the people who are able to stay thin,” he said, giving one example. he continues, “we need to study the non-anxious people just as much as the anxious people.”
using the data to develop new therapeutic approaches for anxiety
to further understand the mechanisms behind enhancers and how they affect the development of illness and disease, including anxiety, professor mackenzie and his team looked at signal transduction pathways, or a flow of information that lives in all cells.
“when two cells communicate with each other, they trigger cascades of protein modification events within the cytoplasm that terminates in the nucleus, so it’s like a chain of information pathway that runs in all cells,” he said. “these signal transduction pathways are actually very good drug targets and have been used through the years to develop lots of different drugs.”
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