Early Life Adversity and Adult Health

2018 ◽  
pp. 48-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia S. Levine ◽  
Gregory E. Miller ◽  
Margie E. Lachman ◽  
Teresa E. Seeman ◽  
Edith Chen
Keyword(s):  
Cardiovascular Disease ◽  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Psychosocial Factors ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Protective Role ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Adult Health ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
And Coping ◽  
Parental Maltreatment

Research has shown that early life adversity can have implications for health later in life. Specifically, socioeconomic disadvantage, parental maltreatment, and parent divorce and death in childhood have been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and mortality in adulthood. Increasingly, recent research has focused on which factors can protect against these poor health outcomes and what promotes resilience, despite early life adversity. This chapter reviews research linking early life adversity to health, with a focus on highlighting the psychosocial factors that play this type of protective role. These factors include social and relational ones, such as maternal nurturance, as well as beliefs and coping strategies. The chapter concludes by suggesting areas of future research, including additional investigation of which psychosocial factors protect health, how multiple psychosocial factors might interact to protect health, and how early life adversity might affect adult health across different groups throughout the life span.

scholarly journals Targeting Parenting Quality to Reduce Early Life Adversity Impacts on Lifespan Cardiometabolic Risk

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria E. Bleil ◽  
Susan J. Spieker ◽  
Cathryn Booth-LaForce
Keyword(s):  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Cardiometabolic Risk ◽  
Intervention Studies ◽  
Cardiometabolic Disease ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Cardiometabolic Health ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
Parenting Quality ◽  
Family Based

Mounting evidence that early life adversity (ELA) exposures confer risk for cardiometabolic disease over the lifespan motivated this narrative review to examine parenting quality as a potential intervention target to reduce ELA exposures or mitigate their impact as a way of reducing or preventing cardiometabolic disease. We describe findings from the limited number of family-based intervention studies in ELA-exposed children that have tested parenting impacts on cardiometabolic health outcomes. We then describe the implications of this work and make recommendations for future research that will move this field forward.

Better Exposure Definitions And Control Selections Are Needed For Chinese Famine Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Chihua Li ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Adult Health ◽  
Human History ◽  
Natural Experiments ◽  
And Control

Famines in human history have been widely used as natural experiments to study how early-life environments may influence adult health outcomes, including overweight/obesity, diabetes and schizophrenia.

Addiction, inequality and recovery

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Svanberg
Keyword(s):  
Substance Use ◽  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Health Inequalities ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
Health Equality ◽  
Societal Inequality ◽  
Rich Countries ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines the impact of health inequalities on addiction and how the recommendations of the Marmot Review could influence recovery from addiction. The Marmot Review was tasked with devising strategies to reduce health inequalities in England, and rightly recognised that health equality requires a debate about what kind of society we want to live in. When considering societies as a whole, there is a clearer relationship between poor health outcomes and societal inequality; rich countries with a steep social gradient do worse than poorer, but more equal, countries. The chapter first provides an overview of factors that cause substance use and addiction before discussing the role of early life adversity in addiction and the link between inequality and addiction. More specifically, it explains how unequal societies lead to addiction and goes on to consider how society can support recovery from addiction.

783 Early Life Adversity and Central Symptoms of Sleep Disturbance: A Network Analysis

SLEEP ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (Supplement_2) ◽  
pp. A304-A305
Author(s):  
Francisco Marquez ◽  
Andrea Decker ◽  
Jennifer Taber ◽  
Mengya Xia ◽  
Matthew Cribbet
Keyword(s):  
Network Analysis ◽  
Sleep Quality ◽  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Sleep Disturbance ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Quality Index ◽  
Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
Adverse Health ◽  
Adverse Health Outcomes

Abstract Introduction Individuals with early life adversity (ELA) experience a greater likelihood of sleep disturbance. Sleep disturbance is a hypothesized mechanism underlying the association between ELA and adverse health outcomes. However, it is unclear whether sleep disturbance presents differently in individuals with ELA when compared to individuals without ELA. Network analysis provides an analytic framework to examine the relationships and magnitudes of association between symptoms of sleep disturbance. Using a network framework, we investigated the differences in sleep disturbance symptoms between individuals with ELA and individuals without ELA. Methods College students (N=507; age=18±1, Female=72%) completed demographic measures, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index using an online data collection platform from March-December 2020. Using clinical cutoffs, individuals with ELA were separated from individuals without ELA. Using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI; alpha=0.79), sleep disturbance was assessed. Two 7-node ELA-specific networks were generated using raw values for the 7 components of the PSQI. To assess network accuracy, stability coefficients were estimated using the ‘bootnet’ and ‘qgraph’ packages in R. The strength of association between each component and all other components of sleep disturbance were estimated using expected influence (EI). Network structures and measures of EI were examined for differences between exposure groups. Results Overall, the average global PSQI score was 7.50±3.37. Individuals with ELA had larger global PSQI scores when compared to individuals without ELA (8.18 versus 6.97, t=3.8, p<0.001, d=0.37). For individuals with ELA, sleep quality, duration, and efficiency were most associated with other symptoms of sleep disturbance. For individuals without ELA, subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, and daytime dysfunction were most related to other symptoms of sleep disturbance. Individuals with ELA demonstrated a more interrelated network structure, with greater raw measures of EI in most components of the PSQI. Conclusion For individuals with ELA, duration and efficiency strongly underly sleep disturbance. Moreover, most symptoms had greater measures of EI in individuals with ELA when compared to individuals without ELA, suggesting that symptoms of sleep disturbance may be more likely to co-occur in individuals with ELA. Future research may explore the utility of these symptoms in predicting adverse health outcomes. Support (if any):

scholarly journals Population DNA methylation studies in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) framework

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. Felix ◽  
C. A. M. Cecil
Keyword(s):  
Dna Methylation ◽  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Epigenetic Mechanism ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Developmental Origins ◽  
Use Of Resources ◽  
Health And Disease

AbstractEpigenetic changes represent a potential mechanism underlying associations of early-life exposures and later life health outcomes. Population-based cohort studies starting in early life are an attractive framework to study the role of such changes. DNA methylation is the most studied epigenetic mechanism in population research. We discuss the application of DNA methylation in early-life population studies, some recent findings, key challenges and recommendations for future research. Studies into DNA methylation within the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease framework generally either explore associations between prenatal exposures and offspring DNA methylation or associations between offspring DNA methylation in early life and later health outcomes. Only a few studies to date have integrated prospective exposure, epigenetic and phenotypic data in order to explicitly test the role of DNA methylation as a potential biological mediator of environmental effects on health outcomes. Population epigenetics is an emerging field which has challenges in terms of methodology and interpretation of the data. Key challenges include tissue specificity, cell type adjustment, issues of power and comparability of findings, genetic influences, and exploring causality and functional consequences. Ongoing studies are working on addressing these issues. Large collaborative efforts of prospective cohorts are emerging, with clear benefits in terms of optimizing power and use of resources, and in advancing methodology. In the future, multidisciplinary approaches, within and beyond longitudinal birth and preconception cohorts will advance this complex, but highly promising, the field of research.

Gender, Early Life Adversity, and Adult Health

2018 ◽  
pp. 62-74
Author(s):  
Chioun Lee ◽  
Carol D. Ryff ◽  
Christopher L. Coe
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Adult Health ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
The Us ◽  
Physical Health Problems ◽  
Social Demographic ◽  
Future Work

There is considerable evidence that stressful experiences in early life affect a wide array of physical health problems in adulthood. Although social demographic characteristics, such as gender, are important determinants of exposure and vulnerability to early life adversities, relatively little attention has been given to the role of gender in the associations between early adversity and adult health. This review summarizes theoretical and empirical studies that explore various gender differences in these relationships. A conceptual model is proposed outlining potential pathways that explain how and under what conditions early experiences might compromise the health of women relative to men in adulthood. Then, recent empirical work is presented to illustrate the conceptual model. Finally, ideas for future work are suggested to investigate different aspects of this model using multiple waves from the Midlife in the US study.

scholarly journals Social bonds do not mediate the relationship between early adversity and adult glucocorticoids in wild baboons

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (33) ◽  
pp. 20052-20062 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacy Rosenbaum ◽  
Shuxi Zeng ◽  
Fernando A. Campos ◽  
Laurence R. Gesquiere ◽  
Jeanne Altmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Stress Response ◽  
Stress Responses ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
Early Adversity ◽  
Adult Health ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
Prospective Longitudinal ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Wild Baboons

In humans and other animals, harsh conditions in early life can have profound effects on adult physiology, including the stress response. This relationship may be mediated by a lack of supportive relationships in adulthood. That is, early life adversity may inhibit the formation of supportive social ties, and weak social support is itself often linked to dysregulated stress responses. Here, we use prospective, longitudinal data from wild baboons in Kenya to test the links between early adversity, adult social bonds, and adult fecal glucocorticoid hormone concentrations (a measure of hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal [HPA] axis activation and the stress response). Using a causal inference framework, we found that experiencing one or more sources of early adversity led to a 9 to 14% increase in females’ glucocorticoid concentrations across adulthood. However, these effects were not mediated by weak social bonds: The direct effects of early adversity on adult glucocorticoid concentrations were 11 times stronger than the effects mediated by social bonds. This pattern occurred, in part, because the effect of social bonds on glucocorticoids was weak compared to the powerful effects of early adversity on glucocorticoid levels in adulthood. Hence, in female baboons, weak social bonds in adulthood are not enough to explain the effects of early adversity on glucocorticoid concentrations. Together, our results support the well-established notions that early adversity and weak social bonds both predict poor adult health. However, the magnitudes of these two effects differ considerably, and they may act independently of one another.

scholarly journals Differential Alterations in Resting State Functional Connectivity Associated with Depressive Symptoms and Early Life Adversity

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 591
Author(s):  
Eleonora Fadel ◽  
Heinz Boeker ◽  
Matti Gaertner ◽  
Andre Richter ◽  
Birgit Kleim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Depressive Symptoms ◽  
Functional Connectivity ◽  
Childhood Abuse ◽  
Resting State ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Clinical Symptoms ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Resting State Functional Connectivity ◽  
Early Life Adversity ◽  
Depression Subtypes

Depression and early life adversity (ELA) are associated with aberrant resting state functional connectivity (FC) of the default mode (DMN), salience (SN), and central executive networks (CEN). However, the specific and differential associations of depression and ELA with FC of these networks remain unclear. Applying a dimensional approach, here we analyzed associations of FC between major nodes of the DMN, SN, and CEN with severity of depressive symptoms and ELA defined as childhood abuse and neglect in a sample of 83 healthy and depressed subjects. Depressive symptoms were linked to increased FC within the SN and decreased FC of the SN with the DMN and CEN. Childhood abuse was associated with increased FC within the SN, whereas childhood neglect was associated with decreased FC within the SN and increased FC between the SN and the DMN. Our study thus provides evidence for differential associations of depressive symptoms and ELA with resting state FC and contributes to a clarification of previously contradictory findings. Specific FC abnormalities may underlie specific cognitive and emotional impairments. Future research should link specific clinical symptoms resulting from ELA to FC patterns thereby characterizing depression subtypes with specific neurobiological signatures.

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