ArticlePsychoneuroendocrinology2020
Intergenerational transmission of childhood trauma? Testing cellular aging in mothers exposed to sexual abuse and their children.
Article in Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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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
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Association between Childhood Exposure to Family Violence and Telomere Length: A Meta-Analysis.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Pooled it
- Collective Intergenerational Trauma in Children and Families: Transmission Mechanisms, Effects and Therapeutic Interventions by Health and Social Work Professionals to Promote Health and Strengthen Psychological Resilience.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- The Many Faces of Child Abuse: How Clinical, Genetic and Epigenetic Correlates Help Us See the Full Picture.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Editorial on Child Abuse and Neglect II.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Parental Preconception Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms and Maternal Prenatal Inflammation Prospectively Predict Shorter Telomere Length in Children.Psychosomatic medicine · 2024Article
- The interaction of socioeconomic stress and race on telomere length in children: A systematic review and meta-analysis.SSM - population health · 2023Article
- Psychological and biological mechanisms linking trauma with cardiovascular disease risk.Translational psychiatry · 2023Review
- Leukocyte methylomic imprints of exposure to the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda: a pilot epigenome-wide analysis.Epigenomics · 2022Article
- Psychobiological Consequences of Childhood Sexual Abuse: Current Knowledge and Clinical Implications.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Review
- Impact of Amplification Efficiency Approaches on Telomere Length MeasurementFrontiers in genetics · 2021Article
- Uninterruptible Power Supply Improves Precision and External Validity of Telomere Length MeasurementExperimental results · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundExposure to maltreatment in childhood can lead to increased risk for poor health outcomes in adulthood. Child maltreatment and later poor health may be linked by premature biological aging. We tested whether childhood sexual abuse (CSA) was associated with telomere length (TL) in adult females. We further tested the hypothesis of intergenerational transmission of CSA-related effects by measuring TL in both CSA-exposed and non-exposed mothers and their children.
methodsParticipants were a subset of females and their children in a prospective-longitudinal cohort study of sexually abused females and a demographically comparable control group from the same Washington, D.C. area. TL was measured using qPCR in both leukocyte and buccal samples from females (N = 108, mean age 36.3 years) and buccal samples from their children (N = 124, mean age 10.5 years). Multilevel models were used to test associations between CSA-exposure and TL measured in leukocytes and buccal tissue in females and to test the intergenerational effect of maternal-CSA exposure on age-adjusted TL in their children.
resultsCSA-exposure was not associated with TL in adult females. Maternal TL and biological sex were significant predictors of child TL such that longer maternal TL predicted longer TL in children, and female children had longer TL than male children. However, maternal-CSA exposure did not predict TL in children. DISCUSSION: CSA-exposure was not associated with TL in this cohort of middle-aged females, nor was there evidence for an intergenerational effect of maternal-CSA exposure on child TL. This finding is in line with some previous results on CSA and adult TL. Previous significant results associating child maltreatment with shorter TL may be capturing a population of individuals exposed to either multiple types of maltreatment compared to controls with no childhood adversity, or maltreatment in childhood with concurrent TL measurements.
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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.