According to research published by the American Psychological Association, children who suffered trauma from abuse or violence in childhood showed biological signs of faster ageing than those who never experienced trauma.
The study looked at three different signs of biological ageing — early puberty, cellular ageing and changes in brain structure – and found that trauma exposure was associated with changes in all three. Katie McLaughlin, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard University and senior author of the study published in the journal Psychology Bulletin and her colleagues focused separately at two categories of adversity: threat-related adversity, such as abuse and violence, and deprivation-related adversity, such as physical or emotional neglect or poverty.
The researchers performed a meta-analysis of just about 80 studies, with about 116,000 total participants and located that children who suffered threat-related adversity were likely to enter puberty early and showed cellular signs of ageing like shortened telomeres – the protective caps at end of DNA that wear down as we age. However, children who experienced poverty or neglect didn’t show either of these signs.
In a second analysis, McLaughlin and her colleagues systematically reviewed 25 studies with more than 3,253 participants to find the link between brain development and trauma. They found that adversity was related to reduced cortical thickness — a symbol of ageing because the cortex thins as people age. However, different adversities showed different rates of cortical thinness. Trauma and violence were related to thinning within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in social and emotional processing, while deprivation was more often related to thinning in the fronto-parietal cortex, which is involved in sensory and cognitive processing.
According to McLaughlin, these types of accelerated ageing might have descended from useful evolutionary adaptations, for example, reaching puberty faster will make people likely to reproduce before they die and faster development of emotional processing could help children identify and respond to threats. But these may manifest as major health concerns in adulthood.
The study suggests that such early life trauma could be the beginning of various health concerns faced in adulthood. There are various psychosocial approaches that can be taken to treat children who experienced trauma.
McLaughlin added that the next step would be to determine whether these approaches can slow down this pattern of accelerated ageing which could help prevent long term health problems caused by such childhood adversities.
Reference: American Psychological Association
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