November 12, 2012

expert reaction to study of beating/insulting children and developing diseases in adulthood

A paper in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine found adults with diseases were more likely to report they had been verbally or physically abused as children.

Prof David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor Of The Public Understanding Of Risk at the University of Cambridge, said:

“I would be very cautious about over-interpreting these results.  For example, the controls are taken from administrators and nurses at the hospital treating the patients, and so are likely to differ in many ways from the ill people.  The controls reported less beating and insulting as children, so maybe not being beaten encourages people to enter a caring profession, rather than protecting them from disease?”

Dr Andrea Danese, Clinical Lecturer in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, said:

“This research adds to the growing body of research linking childhood maltreatment to later disease. It is possible that child maltreatment may not only affect risk for mental illness but also contribute to risk for medical illness, such as asthma, cancer, and cardiac disease.

“This may have major implication for the way we understand the origins of disease and, thus, for disease prevention.  However, the evidence is largely based on retrospective reports of childhood maltreatment. In other words, instead of assessing maltreatment in childhood years and following children for years until they reach adulthood to check their health status, often researchers have asked adult people with or without disease to report on their memories of maltreatment in childhood.  The claims may therefore be biased or overstated, because ill people may be more likely to report unhappy childhood.

“Another problem is confounding.  What appears to be the effect of child maltreatment on later disease, may in fact be the effect of poverty, social isolation, or other factors that are related to both maltreatment and later disease.  Thus, although suggestive of a potential link between child maltreatment and ill health in adult life, more, carefully-design research is needed to understand this link, which has potentially major public health relevance.

“It is also vital to understand the mechanisms through which child maltreatment may influence health.  If we understand the biological and behavioural changes brought about by child maltreatment, we might be able to stop these processes before the onset of clinical symptoms.”

‘Beating and insulting children as a risk for adult cancer, cardiac disease and asthma’ by Michael E. Hyland et al. is published in Journal of Behavioral Medicine.