February 13, 2012

expert reaction to new research on childhood maltreatment, as published in PNAS

A study into how maltreatment in childhood can have an effect on areas of the brain that control stress response was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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

“This intriguing study gives us new insights on how childhood maltreatment may affect the brain. The study does so in an imaginative way. Thanks to high-resolution brain imaging analysis, authors were able to home in on minute areas of the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory and emotion regulation. Because of the enhanced resolution, they could take advantage of prior knowledge that certain areas within the hippocampus are more sensitive than others to the influence of stress mediators, such as glucocorticoid hormones and inflammation proteins. Authors observed that individuals reporting a history of childhood maltreatment had smaller volume in areas of the hippocampus that are more sensitive to the influence of stress mediators. This consistent pattern suggested that childhood maltreatment may affect brain structures through the influence of glucocorticoid hormones and inflammation proteins. Future studies should directly test whether hormonal and immune mediators can indeed influence brain changes over time and after exposure to childhood maltreatment, and the extent to which these biological findings relate to clinical outcomes.”

Dr Carmine M. Pariante, Reader in Biological Psychiatry and Head of the Sections of Perinatal Psychiatry & Stress, Psychiatry and Immunology, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, said:

“Childhood maltreatment is like a surgical strike on the brain. It affects selectively the small area of the brain that regulates stress response. This explains why these individuals are at risk to develop a host of stress-related disorders later in life, like depression and PTSD, because they have an impaired ability to cope with stress. Also, this is the only area of the brain where new brain cells are born every day, and it is likely that childhood maltreatment reduces the number of these new brain cells. However, the brain can also heal, and we can improve resilience and stress-coping mechanisms in these individuals by a number of environmental and therapeutic interventions?”

‘Childhood maltreatment is associated with reduced volume in the hippocampal subfields CA3, dentate gyrus, and subiculum’ by Teicher et al., published in PNAS on Monday 13 February 2012