Childhood Adversity Can Change Your Brain

Adversity in early childhood in the form of anything from poverty to physical abuse has measurable changes in brain function. Exposure during childhood or adolescence to environmental circumstances is likely to require significant psychological, social, or neurobiological adaptation by an average child and represents a deviation from the expected environment. The findings of the epidemiological studies clearly indicate that exposure to childhood adversity greatly influences the risk for psychopathology.

1. Epigenetic changes:

When we are pushed again and again into stressful situations during childhood or adolescence, our physiological response to stress becomes a saturation, and we lose the ability to respond appropriately, and this happens due to a process known as methylation of the gene.

2. Size and shape of the brain:

Scientists have discovered that when the developing brain suffers chronic stress, it releases a hormone. Children whose brains have been changed by their Adverse Childhood Experiences are more likely to become adults who are overreacting to even minor stressors.

3. Brain connectivity:

According to research, children and adolescents who experienced chronic adversity in childhood were found to have weaker neural connections between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus.

4. Brain-Body Pathway:

The researchers found that an elusive path way between the brain and the immune system through the lymphatic vessels. For a child who has experienced adversity, the relationship between mental and physical suffering is strong: the inflammatory chemicals that flood a child's brain when chronically stressed are not limited to the brain alone; they are transported from head to toe.

5. Telomeres:

Early trauma can make children appear "older", emotionally speaking, than their peers. Now, scientists discovered that Adverse Childhood Experiences can prematurely age children also at the cellular level.