ReviewNature reviews. Neuroscience2025
Early adversity alters brain architecture and increases susceptibility to mental health disorders.
Review in Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Movement-Anchored Emotional Memory: An Embodied Neuropsychological Framework.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Review
- History of childhood trauma enhances the detrimental effects of recent stressors on brain structure and function in major depressive disorder.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2026Article
- NMDA receptor-dependent structural plasticity links early life stress to persistent aggression.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Review
- Distinct scars: unique effects of physical and sexual abuse on mental health outcomes in a gender-specific substance use disorder sample in Brazil from 1998 to 2024.Archives of women's mental health · 2026Observational
- Individual differences in adolescent cortical development are associated with neighborhood characteristics: Longitudinal findings from the ABCD study.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Peptide signaling in the paraventricular thalamus contributes to disrupted adult reward behaviors after early-life adversity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Lifetime stressor exposure, executive functioning, and internalizing symptoms during emerging adulthood.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Developmental trauma in functional motor disorder: the mediating roles of affective symptoms and multimorbidity.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Review
- Brain controllability mediates the effects of early life adversity on adolescent behavior and cognition moderated by genetic risks.Research square · 2026Article
- Corticotropin releasing hormone-expressing inputs to the thalamic paraventricular nucleus: pathways from mother to memory?Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- The adrenal is doing what it's supposed to do, you just don't understand it.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Review
- Insurance-based Disparities in Pediatric Psychiatric Hospitalizations from 2018 to 2021: Examining Mental Health Outcomes among Medicaid and Commercially Insured Youth.The Psychiatric quarterly · 2026Article
- Glucocorticoids and cell fate in the developing brain: Neuroendocrine mechanisms shaping developmental trajectories.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2026Review
- Income insufficiency impacts early brain development in infants facing increased psychosocial adversity: A network-based approach.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Adolescent and adult stress alter excitatory-inhibitory network dynamics in the medial prefrontal cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Childhood unpredictability, expressive suppression, and mindfulness as predictors of bystanders' outsider behaviors in cyberbullying among Chinese undergraduates: a moderated mediation model.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Systems-based psychiatry: insights from psychedelic research on mechanisms of healing.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Altered dynamic functional connectivity in adults with rural left-behind experience: a resting-state fMRI study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Each year, millions of children around the world are exposed to a host of adverse experiences early in life. These include various forms of maltreatment, growing up in unsafe neighbourhoods, and witnessing intimate partner violence. These experiences exact a toll on the brain development and mental health of children. In this Review, we attempt to explain how brain architecture and circuitry are affected by exposure to such early adversity, which in turn increases susceptibility to mental health disorders later in life. We begin defining what we mean by early adversity and then summarize the experience-dependent nature of postnatal brain development. Within this context, we discuss times in development when the brain is particularly receptive to experience (critical periods) and, thus, is more vulnerable to adverse experiences. Drawing from studies with both rodent and non-human primate models and neuroimaging research with humans, we next discuss how the circuitry of the brain is affected by early-life adversity, with a focus on the subsequent effects upon neural network development. We then review the mental health consequences of adverse experiences in early life across mental health disorders and within specific dimensions of psychopathology. We conclude by offering a conceptual model of the pathway that links exposure to adversity early in life to these mental health outcomes later in life, and we provide suggestions for future research.
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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.