Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Causal effects of the early caregiving environment on development of stress response systems in children.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 210 papers, 9 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
210 citing papers in PubMed, 9 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 420 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dimensions of early life adversity and cardiometabolic health in adulthood: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2026Pooled it
- Cognitive Outcomes of Children With Complex Trauma: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses of Longitudinal Studies.Trauma, violence & abuse · 2023Pooled it
- Parent-child separation and cardiometabolic outcomes and risk factors in adulthood: A systematic review.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2023Pooled it
- The effect of adverse childhood experiences on chronic pain and major depression in adulthood: a systematic review and meta-analysis.British journal of anaesthesia · 2023Pooled it
- Early childhood stress responses to psychosocial stressors: The state of the science.Developmental psychobiology · 2022Pooled it
- Culture and stress biology in immigrant youth from the prenatal period to adolescence: A systematic review.Developmental psychobiology · 2021Pooled it
- Cumulative childhood adversity and adult cardiometabolic disease: A meta-analysis.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2018Pooled it
- FMRFamide-like peptides expand the behavioral repertoire of a densely connected nervous system.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Pooled it
- Early-life adversity and cortisol response to social stress: a meta-analysis.Translational psychiatry · 2017Pooled it
- Telomere trajectories from early adolescence to adulthood following early institutionalization: Protective effects of foster care in the Bucharest Early Intervention Project.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2026Trial
- Family-based care buffers the stress sensitizing effect of early deprivation on executive functioning difficulties in adolescence.Child development · 2023Trial
- Early deprivation alters structural brain development from middle childhood to adolescence.Science advances · 2022Trial
- Reduced vagal activity in borderline personality disorder is unaffected by intranasal oxytocin administration, but predicted by the interaction between childhood trauma and attachment insecurity.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2022Trial
- Autonomic reactivity to social rejection, peer difficulties, and the buffering effects of adolescent friendships following early psychosocial deprivation.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2022Trial
- Environmental determinants of physiological reactivity to stress: The interacting effects of early life deprivation, caregiving quality, and stressful life events.Development and psychopathology · 2020Trial
- The prospective association between stressful life events and inflammation among adolescents with a history of early institutional rearing.Development and psychopathology · 2020Trial
- Stress sensitization among severely neglected children and protection by social enrichment.Nature communications · 2019Trial
- Externalizing trajectories predict elevated inflammation among adolescents exposed to early institutional rearing: A randomized clinical trial.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2019Trial
- The Consequences of Foster Care Versus Institutional Care in Early Childhood on Adolescent Cardiometabolic and Immune Markers: Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial.Psychosomatic medicine · 2019Trial
- Effects of an attachment-based intervention in infancy on children's autonomic regulation during middle childhood.Biological psychology · 2019Trial
150 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Disruptions in stress response system functioning are thought to be a central mechanism by which exposure to adverse early-life environments influences human development. Although early-life adversity results in hyperreactivity of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in rodents, evidence from human studies is inconsistent. We present results from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project examining whether randomized placement into a family caregiving environment alters development of the autonomic nervous system and HPA axis in children exposed to early-life deprivation associated with institutional rearing. Electrocardiogram, impedance cardiograph, and neuroendocrine data were collected during laboratory-based challenge tasks from children (mean age = 12.9 y) raised in deprived institutional settings in Romania randomized to a high-quality foster care intervention (n = 48) or to remain in care as usual (n = 43) and a sample of typically developing Romanian children (n = 47). Children who remained in institutional care exhibited significantly blunted SNS and HPA axis responses to psychosocial stress compared with children randomized to foster care, whose stress responses approximated those of typically developing children. Intervention effects were evident for cortisol and parasympathetic nervous system reactivity only among children placed in foster care before age 24 and 18 months, respectively, providing experimental evidence of a sensitive period in humans during which the environment is particularly likely to alter stress response system development. We provide evidence for a causal link between the early caregiving environment and stress response system reactivity in humans with effects that differ markedly from those observed in rodent models.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.