A team of scientists with researchers from several institutions in France has found that multiple stress events that occur early in life can cause an increase in overall wear-and-tear on the body, well into middle age. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes how they conducted a study of survey data collected over the course of a national child development study in Britain and what it revealed.
Prior research has suggested that emotional trauma during childhood can lead to a shorter lifespan and an increase in disease susceptibility later on—in this new study, the team wanted to know more about the long term impact of childhood stressful events so they obtained data from the National Child Development Study, a program where 7,535 random people born in Britain in 1958 have had their health histories tracked for a variety of research purposes. The team with this new effort filtered for children that had experienced at least two traumatic events while still young and then compared their health records against those that had not experienced such events, over the course of their lives up till now. That showed, the team reports, that those who had experienced the traumatic events displayed high allostatic load (AL) by age 44 as compared to other people. Allostatic load is a measure of overall wear-and-tear on the body characterized by indirect symptoms such as decision-making that impacts health, degree of wealth, BMI and education level attained.
[For more of this story, written by Bob Yirka, go to http://medicalxpress.com/news/...y-wear-and-tear.html]
Comments (0)