ArticleBiological psychiatry2021
Long-term Neural Embedding of Childhood Adversity in a Population-Representative Birth Cohort Followed for 5 Decades.
Article in Biological psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Subjective and objective experiences of childhood adversity: a meta-analysis of their agreement and relationships with psychopathology.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2023Pooled it
- Country-level gender inequality is associated with structural differences in the brains of women and men.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Pooled it
- Childhood Maltreatment and Mental Health Problems: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Quasi-Experimental Studies.The American journal of psychiatry · 2023Pooled it
- Neurostructural traces of early life adversities: A meta-analysis exploring age- and adversity-specific effects.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Pooled it
- Identification of comprehensive genetic factors, pathways, and shared genetic architecture of putamen volume in adolescent cohort.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Cognitive and affective neurodevelopment in youth exposed to deprivation and threat.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Interpersonal adversity and health across the life course.Current opinion in psychology · 2026Review
- Impact of adverse life experiences on pain, depression, anxiety, and comorbidities: a youth longitudinal sample.Pain reports · 2026Article
- Echoes of childhood trauma: the relationship between adverse childhood experiences, brain structure, and mental health in aging adults.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Glucocorticoids and cell fate in the developing brain: Neuroendocrine mechanisms shaping developmental trajectories.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2026Review
- Persistent structural alteration of the extended limbic system in adolescents with childhood maltreatment.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2026Article
- Early Exposure to Deprivation or Threat Moderates Expected Associations Between Neural Structure and Age in Adolescent Girls.Child maltreatment · 2025Article
- The moderating effect of lifetime physical activity on brain alterations related to adverse childhood experiences.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2025Article
- Early adversity alters brain architecture and increases susceptibility to mental health disorders.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Structural Brain Correlates of Multidomain Resilience Among Youth Exposed to Neighborhood Disadvantage.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Cortical Surface Area Profile Mediates Effects of Childhood Disadvantage on Later-Life General Cognitive Ability.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2024Article
- The Continuity of Adversity: Negative Emotionality Links Early Life Adversity With Adult Stressful Life Events.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- The impact of psychosocial adversity on brain and behaviour: an overview of existing knowledge and directions for future research.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Review
- Neonatal Isolation Increases the Susceptibility to Learned Helplessness through the Aberrant Neuronal Activity in the Ventral Pallidum of Rats.Clinical psychopharmacology and neuroscience : the official scientific journal of the Korean College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Article
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Abstract
backgroundChildhood adversity has been previously associated with alterations in brain structure, but heterogeneous designs, methods, and measures have contributed to mixed results and have impeded progress in mapping the biological embedding of childhood adversity. We sought to identify long-term differences in structural brain integrity associated with childhood adversity.
methodsMultiple regression was used to test associations between prospectively ascertained adversity during childhood and adversity retrospectively reported in adulthood with structural magnetic resonance imaging measures of midlife global and regional cortical thickness, cortical surface area, and subcortical gray matter volume in 861 (425 female) members of the Dunedin Study, a longitudinal investigation of a population-representative birth cohort.
resultsBoth prospectively ascertained childhood adversity and retrospectively reported adversity were associated with alterations in midlife structural brain integrity, but associations with prospectively ascertained childhood adversity were consistently stronger and more widely distributed than associations with retrospectively reported childhood adversity. Sensitivity analyses revealed that these associations were not driven by any particular adversity or category of adversity (i.e., threat or deprivation) or by childhood socioeconomic disadvantage. Network enrichment analyses revealed that these associations were not localized but were broadly distributed along a hierarchical cortical gradient of information processing.
conclusionsExposure to childhood adversity broadly is associated with widespread differences in midlife gray matter across cortical and subcortical structures, suggesting that biological embedding of childhood adversity in the brain is long lasting, but not localized. Research using retrospectively reported adversity likely underestimates the magnitude of these associations. These findings may inform future research investigating mechanisms through which adversity becomes embedded in the brain and influences mental health and cognition.
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