The University of Florida's Dr. Nancy Hardt has an unusual double specialty: She's both a pathologist and an OB-GYN. For the first half of her career, she brought babies into the world. Then she switched — to doing autopsies on people after they die.
It makes perfect sense to her.
"Birth, and death. It's the life course," Hardt explains.
A few years ago, Hardt says, she learned about some research that changed her view of how exactly that life course — health or illness — unfolds.
The research shows that kids who have tough childhoods — because of poverty, abuse, neglect, or witnessing domestic violence, for instance — are actually more likely to be sick when they grow up. They're more likely to get diseases like asthma, diabetes and heart disease. And they tend to have shorter lives than people who haven't experienced those difficult events as kids.
[For more of this story, written by Laura Starecheski, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/healt...map-childhood-trauma]
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