Childhood trauma affects the timing of motherhood

June 4, 2020

Science Daily/University of Turku

Women who have experienced childhood trauma become mothers earlier than those with a more stable childhood environment shows a new study conducted in collaboration between the University of Turku and the University of Helsinki in Finland. The trauma children experience form living in war zones, natural disasters or perhaps even epidemics can have unexpected effects that resurface later in their lives.

During the Second World War, thousands of Finnish women and girls volunteered to aid in the war effort as part of the paramilitary organisation 'Lotta Svärd' exposing some to the trauma of war. Researcher and lead author of the study Robert Lynch from the University of Turku used extensive data collected on these volunteers to study the effects of childhood trauma on adults.

The study showed that young girls and women who served in the war became mothers earlier and had more children compared to women of the same age who did not participate in the war effort.

"If we can measure the effects of trauma on basic things such as the timing of motherhood, then it almost certainly has major effects on many of our other important behaviours, such as overall aversion to risk, sociality or the pace of sexual development," explains Lynch.

"This study is groundbreaking because it overcomes many of the pitfalls of research on humans that has made it difficult to know whether trauma is actually the root cause of starting a family at a younger age. The extensive dataset made it possible for us to compare women before and after the war and also take family background into account by comparing sisters. This is strong evidence in support of the idea that trauma affects reproductive schedules," adds senior author, Researcher John Loehr from the University of Helsinki.

The study has clear relevance for the millions of children and adults worldwide who experience trauma through wars. However, relevance likely also extends to other sources of trauma, such as natural disasters or even the current COVID-19 epidemic.

Evolutionary theory predicts that individuals experiencing an unstable environment with high mortality are better off reproducing sooner rather than taking the risk of not having the chance later.

"There appears to be a sensitivity window that extends from childhood into early adulthood where behaviour adjusts to match the circumstances experienced. The consequences can be far-reaching even after the situation stabilises. A childhood trauma can influence people's adult lives in ways that they are unaware of, such as the timing of their motherhood," explains Academy Professor Virpi Lummaa from the University of Turku.

Background: 

Prior to and during the Second World War, many Finnish girls and women volunteered for the 'Lotta Svärd' organisation that was a major part of the war effort. Tasks within the organisation varied greatly, and many of the women performed duties that exposed them to the trauma of war. Towards the end of the war, girls as young as fourteen years of age were entrusted with some of the more demanding jobs usually reserved for adults. The project was funded by the Kone Foundation with data from Karjala Liitto registers and digitised church register data provided by Karjalan tietokantasäätiö.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200604120546.htm

One way childhood trauma leads to poorer health for women

Adversity linked to having births earlier and outside marriage

September 17, 2019

Science Daily/Ohio State University

Researchers have long known that childhood trauma is linked to poorer health for women at midlife. A new study shows one important reason why.

The national study of more than 3,000 women is the first to find that those who experienced childhood trauma were more likely than others to have their first child both earlier in life and outside of marriage -- and that those factors were associated with poorer health later in life.

The findings have implications for public programs to prevent teen pregnancy, said Kristi Williams, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

These results suggest that early trauma -- such as the death of a parent, physical abuse or emotional neglect -- may affect young people's decision-making in ways that they can't entirely control.

"It's easy to tell teens that they shouldn't have kids before marriage, but the message won't be effective if they haven't developed the capacity to do that because of trauma they experienced in childhood," Williams said.

"It may be necessary to do different kinds of interventions and do them when children are younger."

Williams conducted the study with Brian Karl Finch of the University of Southern California. Their results were published today (Sept. 17, 2019) in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Early childhood trauma is "shockingly" common in the United States, the researchers said in the study. One national study conducted between 1995 and 1997 found that only 36 percent of respondents reported having no such adverse childhood experiences.

Other research has shown that childhood trauma is strongly associated with multiple health risks, including cancer, diabetes, stroke and early death, Williams said. Much of this work has focused on how early adversity may have biological and neurological effects that would lead to worse health throughout life.

"But there hasn't been any attention given to how childhood adversity may affect social and developmental processes in adolescence and young adulthood -- factors that we know are also strong predictors of later health," she said.

One of those factors in women is the timing and context of first birth.

Data for this new study came from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which includes a representative sample of people who were aged 14 to 22 in 1979. The NLSY is run by Ohio State's Center for Human Resource Research.

Participants were interviewed every year through 1994 and once every two years since. The final sample for this study included 3,278 women.

Each participant reported whether she experienced one or more of six adverse childhood experiences before age 18: emotional neglect, physical abuse, alcoholism in the home, mental illness in the home, death of a biological parent and parental absence.

The researchers examined data on how old each participant was when she first gave birth and whether she was married, cohabiting or neither at the time.

Finally, participants rated their health at or near age 40.

Findings showed that each additional childhood trauma experienced by the participants was associated with earlier age at first birth and a greater probability for a first birth during adolescence or young adulthood compared to later (age 25 to 39).

In addition, each additional trauma was associated with a 24 percent increase in the probability of being unmarried and not cohabiting at first birth compared to the likelihood that they were married when their first child was born.

The researchers then conducted statistical tests that showed early and non-marital births were a key reason why children who experienced trauma were more likely to report poorer health at midlife.

"It is the idea of 'chains of risk' -- one thing leads to another," Williams said.

"Childhood trauma leads to social and biological risks that lead to early and nonmarital birth which can lead to health problems later in life."

The findings also cast doubt on the notion that childbearing decisions are the result only of the culture in which children grow up, she said.

Some policymakers have claimed that some people don't value marriage enough, and if they were just encouraged not to have kids until after they're married, they would be better off, Williams said.

"You can promote this 'success sequence' -- go to college, get a job, get married and have a child -- exactly in that order. But the reason some people don't do that isn't just cultural, it is structural," Williams said.

"When people experience traumas early in life, it makes it less likely that they will be able to make those positive choices."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190917115436.htm

Childhood adversity linked to early puberty, premature brain development and mental illness

Penn study details effects of poverty and trauma on youth brain and behavior

May 31, 2019

Science Daily/University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Growing up in poverty and experiencing traumatic events like a bad accident or sexual assault can impact brain development and behavior in children and young adults. Low socioeconomic status (L-SES) and the experience of traumatic stressful events (TSEs) were linked to accelerated puberty and brain maturation, abnormal brain development, and greater mental health disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and psychosis, according to a new study published this week in JAMA Psychiatry. The research was conducted by a team from Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) through the Lifespan Brain Institute (LiBI).

"The findings underscore the need to pay attention to the environment in which the child grows. Poverty and trauma have strong associations with behavior and brain development, and the effects are much more pervasive than previously believed," said the study's lead author Raquel E. Gur, MD, PhD, a professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Radiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Lifespan Brain Institute.

Parents and educators are split into opposing camps with regard to the question of how childhood adversity affects development into mature, healthy adulthood. Views differ from "spare the rod and spoil the child" to concerns that any stressful condition such as bullying will have a harmful and lasting effects. Psychologists and social scientists have documented lasting effects of growing up in poverty on cognitive functioning, and clinicians observed effects of childhood trauma on several disorders, though mostly in the context of post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD). There are also anecdotal observations, supported by some research, that adversity accelerates maturation -- children become young adults faster, physically and mentally. Neuroscientists, who are aware of the complexity of changes that the brain must undergo as it transitions from childhood to young adulthood, suspected, and more recently documented that childhood adversity affects important measures of brain structure and function. But this study was the first to compare the effects of poverty (L-SES) to those who experienced TSEs in the same sample set.

The researchers analyzed data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, which included 9,498 participants aged 8 to 21 years for the study. The racially and economically diverse cohort includes data on SES, TSEs, neurocognitive performance, and in a subsample, multimodal neuroimaging taken via MRI.

The researchers found specific associations of SES and TSE with psychiatric symptoms, cognitive performance, and several brain structure abnormalities.

The findings revealed that poverty was associated with small elevation in severity of psychiatric symptoms, including mood/anxiety, phobias, externalizing behavior (oppositional-defiant, conduct disorder, ADHD), and psychosis, as compared to individuals who did not experience poverty. The magnitude of the effects of TSEs on psychiatric symptom severity was unexpectedly large. TSEs were mostly associated with PTSD, but here the authors found that even a single TSE was associated with a moderate increase in severity for all psychiatric symptoms analyzed, and two or more TSEs showed large effect sizes, especially in mood/anxiety and in psychosis. Additionally, these effects were larger in females than in males.

With neurocognitive functioning, the case was reversed; poverty was found to be associated with moderate to large cognitive deficits, especially in executive functioning -- abstraction and mental flexibility, attention, working memory -- and in complex reasoning. TSEs were found to have very subtle effects, with individuals who experienced two or more TSEs showing a mild deficit in complex cognition, but demonstrating slightly better memory performance.

Both poverty and TSEs were associated with abnormalities across measures of brain anatomy, physiology, and connectivity. Poverty associations were widespread, whereas TSEs were associated with more focused differences in the limbic and fronto-parietal regions of the brain, which processes emotions, memory, executive functions and complex reasoning.

The researchers also found evidence that adversity is associated with earlier onset of puberty. Both poverty and experiencing TSEs are associated with the child physically maturing at an earlier age. The researchers also found the same effects on the brain, with findings revealing that a higher proportion of children who experienced adversity had characteristics of adult brains. This affects development, as the careful layering of the structural and functional connectivity in the brain requires time, and early maturity could prevent the necessary honing of skills.

"Altogether our study shows no evidence to support the 'spare the rod' approach, to the contrary we have seen unexpectedly strong effects of TSEs on psychiatric symptoms and of poverty on neurocognitive functioning, and both are associated with brain abnormalities," Gur said. "The study suggests that it makes sense for parents and anyone involved in raising a child to try and shield or protect the child from exposure to adversity. And for those dealing with children who were already exposed to adversity -- as is sadly the case today with refugees around the world -- expect an increase in symptoms and consider cognitive remediation, a type of rehabilitation treatment which aims to improve attention, memory, and other cognitive functions."

"Traumas that happen to young children can have lifelong consequences," said the study's senior author Ruben C. Gur, PhD, a professor of Psychiatry, Radiology, and Neurology, and director of the Brain Behavior Laboratory. "Obviously it would be best if we could ameliorate poverty and prevent traumatic events from occurring. Short of that, the study calls for paying more attention to a child's socioeconomic background and to effects of trauma exposure. Parents and educators should become more aware of the special needs of children who are exposed to either adversity. Additionally, mental health professionals should be particularly on notice that traumatic events are associated not only with PTSD, but with elevations across domains including mood, anxiety, and psychosis."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190531085404.htm

Adverse events during first years of life may have greatest effect on future mental health

May 1, 2019

Science Daily/Massachusetts General Hospital

A Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) study has found evidence that children under 3 years old are most the vulnerable to the effects of adversity -- experiences including poverty, family and financial instability, and abuse -- on their epigenetic profiles, chemical tags that alter gene expression and may have consequences for future mental health. Their report appearing in the May 15 issue of Biological Psychiatry, which has been published online, finds that the timing of adverse experiences has more powerful effects than the number of such experiences or whether they took place recently.

"One of the major unanswered questions in child psychiatry has been 'How do the stressors children experience in the world make them more vulnerable to mental health problems in the future?'," says Erin Dunn, ScD, MPH, of the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit in the MGH Center for Genomic Medicine, corresponding author of the report. "These findings suggest that the first three years of life may be an especially important period for shaping biological processes that ultimately give rise to mental health conditions. If these results are replicated, they imply that prioritizing policies and interventions to children who experienced adversity during those years may help reduce the long-term risk for problems like depression."

Studies conducted in both animals and humans have found that adverse experiences early in life can have lasting effects on epigenetics, the process by which chemical tags added to a DNA sequence control whether or not a gene is expressed. These studies reported differences in DNA methylation, which can either silence or enhance gene expression, between individuals who were and were not exposed to early-life stressors.

The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that there are sensitive periods during which adversity is associated with even greater changes in DNA methylation. The investigators also compared that model to an accumulation hypothesis, in which the effects of adversity increase with the number of events, and a recency hypothesis, that the effects of adversity are stronger when events happened more recently.

They gathered data from participants in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a U.K.-based study that has been following a group of families since the early 1990s. Participating parents report regularly on many aspects of the health and life experiences of their children, who were enrolled in the study before they were born. The current investigation analyzed data from a subgroup of more than 1,000 randomly selected mother/child pairs from which DNA methylation profiles had been run for the children at birth and at age 7.

The children's exposure to adversity before the age of 7 was based on whether parents reported their child's repeated experience of seven stressors:

·     abuse by a parent or other caregiver,

·     abuse by anyone,

·     a mother's mental illness,

·     living in a single-adult household,

·     family instability,

·     family financial stress,

·     neighborhood disadvantage or poverty.

The investigators recorded the number of exposures to each adversity, whether or not they were experienced at specific developmental stages and how close they occurred to the age at which blood samples were taken for the second methylation profile.

The analysis identified 38 DNA methylation sites at which adverse experiences were associated with changes in methylation, most of which were associated with when the stressful experience had taken place. Adversity before the age of 3 had a significantly greater impact on methylation than did adversity at ages 3 to 5 or 5 to 7. Exposure to adversity was typically associated with increased methylation, which would reduce the expression of specific genes; and neighborhood disadvantage appeared to have the greatest impact, followed by family financial stress, sexual or physical abuse, and single-adult households.

Although early-childhood experiences had the greatest effects, adversity at older ages was not without an impact. And while the results provide the strongest evidence for the sensitive or "vulnerable" period model, they do not totally rule out any effect related to the accumulation or recency hypotheses. In fact, two of the sites at which methylation appeared to be changed by adversity were associated with either the number of adverse experiences or how recent they had been.

"These additive effects may work together with the timing of exposure, so it would be interesting to examine more complex mechanisms in future studies with larger groups of participants," says Dunn, an assistant professor of Psychology in the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry. "Our results need to be replicated by other investigators, and we also need to determine whether these changes in DNA methylation patterns are associated with subsequent mental health problems. Only then will we be able to really understand the links between childhood adversity, DNA methylation and the risk of mental health problems; and that understanding could guide us to better ways of preventing those problems from developing."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190501131347.htm