By Noah Lloyd
Faced with a traumatic situation, a child’s biology responds in the only way it can, shunting all resources toward survival. Unfortunately, that might also mean taking resources away from the processes that lead to healthy, long-term growth and development.
New research finds that extreme stress in childhood — for example, from abuse or malnutrition — correlates with worsened cardiac health in later adolescence and likely adulthood. Even when a child is only exposed to adverse conditions in the first few years of life, before the age of 5, those conditions can have measurable, negative effects on their health for at least the next decade.
In a recent study, Brie Reid, an assistant professor of public health and health sciences at Northeastern University, and her intercollegiate team examined almost 200 young people between the ages of 12 and 21. Half the group had been adopted from international orphanages or similar institutions into affluent homes in the Midwestern United States. The other half, as a control group, had been raised from birth in similarly affluent households.
