Early Life Stress Can Leave Lasting Impacts on the Brain

A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers recently showed that toxic stressors, such as poverty, neglect and physical abuse, experienced in early life, might be changing the parts of developing children’s brains responsible for learning, memory and the processing of stress and emotion. For the study, published in Biological Psychiatry, the team recruited 128 children around age 12 who had experienced either physical abuse, neglect early in life or came from low socioeconomic status households. Researchers conducted extensive interviews with the children and their caregivers, and also took images of the children’s brains, focusing on the hippocampus and amygdala. The images then were compared to similar children from middle-class households who had not been maltreated. Indeed, their hand measurements found that children who experienced any of the three types of early life stress had smaller amygdalas than children who had not. Children from low socioeconomic status households and children who had been physically abused also had smaller hippocampal volumes. To learn more about this study, click here.