Early Life Stress Can Impact a Child's Brain

Stress can impact a person's behavior and health. Now, scientists have found that stress experienced early in life can also impact the brain. It turns out that chronic, toxic stress can affect a person long into their adult years.

Previous studies have actually linked early life stress to depression, anxiety, heart disease, cancer, and a lack of educational and employment success. Yet exactly why early stress can affect a person's health has long remained a mystery.

"We haven't really understood why things that happen when you're two, three, four years old stay with you and have a lasting impact," said Seth Pollak, co-leader of the study, in a news release.

That's why scientists decided to take a closer look. They recruited 128 children around the age of 12 who had experienced either physical abuse, neglect early in life or came from low socioeconomic status households. Then, they interviewed the children and their caregivers and took pictures of the children's brains, focusing on the hippocampus and the amygdala, which are involved in emotion and stress processing. These pictures were then compared to similar children who had not been maltreated.

So what did they find? It turns out that the children who were maltreated had a smaller hippocampus and amygdala. More specifically, children who experienced any of the three types of early life stress had a smaller amygdala while children from lower socioeconomic status households and children who had been physically abused had smaller hippocampal volumes.

"For me, it's an important reminder that as a society we need to attend to the types of experiences children are having," said Pollak. "We are shaping the people these individuals will become."

The findings reveal why stress can impact a person late in life. It affects their brain, which can, in turn, impact their health.

The findings are published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.