Vote for our entry in the STAT Madness virtual tournament of science!

Basketball has its March Madness tournament, but for the fourth year in a row, science has its own version: STAT Madness.

And a Depression Center research team has a shot at winning.

STAT Madness, run by the STAT News medical news organization, pits 64 research papers published in the previous year against one another, for a fun and friendly competition that allows members for the public to vote for their favorite entries.

A paper by a team led by Srijan Sen, M.D., Ph.D., was picked for the tournament; vote for it at https://www.statnews.com/feature/stat-madness/bracket/ .

The paper, published in Biological Psychiatry in May 2019, found that the stress and mental strain of the first year of medical residency actually affects the DNA of new physicians – leading to shortening of structures called telomeres at the ends of their chromosomes. The findings, made as part of the Intern Health Study led by Sen, are described in this article.  

Sen and his team at the Michigan Neuroscience Institute worked with Kathryn Ridout, M.D., of Kaiser Permanente and Brown University on the study.

“Research has implicated telomeres as an indicator of aging and disease risk, but these longitudinal findings advance the possibility that telomere length can serve as a biomarker that tracks effects of stress, and helps us understand how stress gets ‘under the skin’ and increases our risk for disease,” says Sen.

Another recent paper by Sen and his team, showed the potential for using genetics and other factors to predict depression among people under intense stress.  Sen’s work has implications not just for new doctors, but for anyone subjected to intense and prolonged stress.