Experts have long known that neglect and abuse in early life increase the risk of psychological problems, such as depression and anxiety, but now neuroscientists are explaining why. They’re showing how early maltreatment wreaks havoc on the developing brain.
Dr. Charles Nelson, a Boston Children’s Hospital neuroscientist, studies how children’s early experiences shape the developing brain. Abuse and neglect, he says, can cause significant damage to the circuitry of the brain. Using neuroimaging tools, he compared the brains of the children brought up in the orphanages in Romania to those of children raised outside. “When the kids were 8 to 10 years old, we did magnetic resonance imaging on them, where we can actually look at detailed anatomy of the brains,” Nelson says. “We found that the kids in the institutional group had much smaller brains. We are not sure why they are small, but it is probably due to loss of connections and loss of cells.”
For more of this story, written by Iris Adler, go to http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2014/06/trauma-abuse-brain-matters]
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