Trauma early in life, disease later in life

A new study published this week reported a definitive link between early life trauma, i.e. child abandonment, abuse and neglect, and disease later in life. It wasn't the injuries from beating that were to blame. Authors indicated that it all boiled down to psychological stress, because, as the lead investigator put it, "...stress is the fear of pain."

While I might argue some subtleties of the last statement, the link between early psychological trauma and later health outcomes was very convincing.

Investigators found that adults who reported being abused or neglected as children had higher levels of an inflammation protein in their blood than did folks who had no such history.

To make matters worse, the research team indicated there were also implications for cortisol, a hormone that normally acts as a brake on inflammation. The result was high risk for conditions like heart disease and diabetes.

This is a case where investigators learned something about early life experience and health and welfare in adulthood through careful, longitudinal study of humans. Real people living real lives complete with all their confounding variables and covariates, are the best and only way to look at complex psychobiological issues like early life trauma. The new study is really quite impressive. One reviewer noted, "They have elegantly connected childhood stress to a real adult risk of disease." (See NewScientist below)

By comparison, other perhaps less creative and certainly less compassionate people try to create animal "models" of child abuse and neglect by subjecting baby animals to maternal deprivation or by purposefully taking healthy babies and putting them with aggressive adults. If the baby animals used in these terrible experiments survive, they suffer from a range of physical and psychological pathologies, conditions that are rarely acknowledged or treated. The outcome has many similarities to post-traumatic stress disorder.

People who run such animal experiments are unable to draw powerful conclusions or to translate their findings directly into clinical practice. Rather, animal experiments cause untold suffering for the animals, waste tax dollars on fruitless research, and divert resources from programs that could benefit humans and other animals affected by trauma and abuse.

In the end, the abuse and neglect experiments with animals relieve no human suffering and cause extraordinary animal suffering, making the entire endeavor morally bankrupt.

Link to abstract in PNAS here.

Other news coverage of the study:

BBC: Child abuse link to future health

NewScientist: Why childhood trauma brings ill health later on