childhood and adverse life events

BACKGROUND: Studies have raised concern about an association between the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) during pregnancy and an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders in the offspring. METHODS: We conducted a cohort study of all singleton live births in Denmark from 1996 through 2005 (626,875 births), with follow-up through 2009. Using Danish population registries, we linked information on maternal use of SSRIs before and during pregnancy, autism spectrum disorders diagnosed in the offspring, and a range of potential confounders...

Home visiting is an important mechanism for minimizing the lifelong effects of early childhood adversity. To do so, it must be informed by the biology of early brain and child development. Advances in neuroscience, epigenetics, and the physiology of stress are revealing the biological mechanisms underlying well-established associations between early childhood adversity and suboptimal life-course trajectories. Left unchecked, mediators of physiologic stress become toxic, alter both genome and brain, and lead to a vicious cycle of chronic stress...

Decades of research have indicated the foundational importance of parenting to offspring outcomes during childhood and beyond. Unearthing the specific origins of parenting is therefore a critically important research objective. Extant research on this topic has suggested that parenting behaviors are multidetermined (Belsky, 1984) and are associated with a wide range of contextual and familial characteristics (e.g., ethnicity, community, family financial stress), as well as characteristics of the parents (e...

OBJECTIVE: The hippocampus and amygdala have received much attention with regard to the deleterious effects of childhood maltreatment. However, it is not known if and when these effects emerge during adolescence and whether comorbid psychopathology is more likely to explain these effects. This study investigated whether childhood maltreatment was associated with hippocampal and amygdala development from early to midadolescence and whether the experience of psychopathology during this period mediated the relation...

BACKGROUND: To analyse whether Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) are associated with an increased risk of cancer. METHODS: The National child development study (NCDS) is a prospective birth cohort study with data collected over 50 years. The NCDS included all live births during one week in 1958 (n=18558) in Great Britain. Self-reported cancer incidence was based on 444 participants reporting having had cancer at some point and 5694 reporting never having cancer...

OBJECTIVES: To determine the frequency and types of stressful events experienced by urban Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, and to explore the relationship between these experiences and the children's physical health and parental concerns about their behaviour and learning ability. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: Cross-sectional study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged ≤ 14 2013s presenting to an urban Indigenous primary health care service in Brisbane for annual child health checks between March 2007 and March 2010...

BACKGROUND: Traumatic childhood experiences are important societal problems and have far-reaching mental and somatic consequences. There is a considerable amount of literature concerning the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and anxiety, depression and substance abuse in adulthood. AIM: To integrate systematically all available research data on this relationship. METHOD: We studied the literature via PubMed and PsycINFO using the search terms ‘ACEs', ‘anxiety', ‘depression', ‘substance abuse', and ‘impact'...

This paper examines the effects of three different types of father absence on the timing of life history events among women in rural Bangladesh. Age at marriage and age at first birth are compared across women who experienced different father presence/absence conditions as children. Survival analyses show that daughters of fathers who divorced their mothers or deserted their families have consistently younger ages at marriage and first birth than other women. In contrast, daughters whose fathers were labor migrants have consistently older ages at marriage and first birth...

In this study, depressive symptomatology in Central American immigrant mothers with adolescent daughters living in the USA was explored. Using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Short Scale, the Family History Scale, an Acculturation Scale, and the core section of the Youth Conduct Disorder scale from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 101 Central American mothers were analyzed to identify predictors of depressive symptoms. Over one-third of the participants had depressive symptoms...

The authors examined the impact of cumulative neighborhood risk of psychosocial stress on allostatic load (AL) among adolescents as a mechanism through which life stress, including neighborhood conditions, may affect health and health inequities. They conducted multilevel analyses, weighted for sampling and propensity score-matched, among adolescents aged 12-20 years in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1999-2006). Individuals (first level, n = 11,886) were nested within families/households (second level, n = 6,696) and then census tracts (third level, n = 2,191) for examination of the contextual effect of cumulative neighborhood risk environment on AL...