These pop-sci articles annoy me greatly. All I can think reading the title is “well, duh?” - they’re a complete tautology.

Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it. These types of articles confirming that such a record has been found might be great news for researchers, but for everyone else, the existence of this physical record was already known a priori. We are biological machines after all, all behaviours are encoded physically.

If there was no such scar in brain cells, there would have been no early-life stress.

This applies to other research such as “learning changes structure of the brain” or “drug addiction turns off specific neural pathways” or “brains of children with autism differ from neurotypical brains” or “athletes have more developed muscles”

We do all know experience has its substrate, but one thing matters more—are they encoded as stubborn neural connections, mitochondrial damage, epigenetic marks, or something else to transform it into depression, long-term inflammation, or stress susceptibility, etc.? The current evidence emphasizes epigenetics. Only if we know what the 'it' is, do we have chance to change, rather than just knowing it exists.

> if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it

Yes, and it (or at least one of them) has now been found. Maybe you don't care about knowledge for its own sake, but as the "irritating" press release goes on to point out,

“There are currently no treatments for what early-life stress does to the brain, partially because we have not had a clear picture of what molecular mechanisms to target,” Peña said. “This work is exciting because it reveals a clear mechanism, and also helps explain why the impact of stress is both latent and broad.

Scar is also a very loaded word to use here for something that is not a scar.

This article talks about a finding related to SETD7. This has implications for new treatments.

> Let me explain: if an event or behaviour affects a person, it means that there must be a physical record of it.

That record needn’t be inside individual brain cells.