“What we’re learning is that poor adult health is, in part, manufactured in childhood. It is multiple and cumulative childhood experience that predisposes adults to poor health.”

The Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London studied 1,000 individuals from birth to age 32 as part of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study in New Zealand. Their research suggests that sustained health risks stem from childhood abuse, neglect, social isolation or economic hardship.

Adults who had been maltreated as children were twice as likely to suffer major depression and chronic inflammation. Children who grew up poor or socially isolated were twice as likely to show metabolic risk markers at age 32. Adults who had two or more of the adverse childhood experiences were nearly twice as likely to have disease risk factors as those who hadn’t experienced trauma in childhood.

“We live increasingly longer lives and our extra years of life should be healthy, productive and enjoyable, not years of disease and disability,” says lead author Dr Andrea Danese, Clinical Lecturer at Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and MRC Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry at King’s. “In this study, we observed that childhood experiences may affect health in old age, regardless of the risk factors that health policies are currently targeting. Therefore the promotion of healthy positive experiences for children is a necessary and potentially cost-effective target for the prevention of age-related disease.”

Co-author Professor Avshalom Caspi, Duke University, US, adds: “What we’re learning is that poor adult health is, in part, manufactured in childhood. It is multiple and cumulative childhood experience that predisposes adults to poor health.”

This is why most effective mental health therapies and technologies target childhood trauma – known as regression to cause. Rapid Eye Technology, for example, focuses attention on the pre-birth to birth era and then onward into childhood in what is called the Birth Story and Inner Child Stages. The intent of this focus is to draw out and release the life force energy (health) tied up in traumas of those periods of life – which tends strongly to increase overall health in the adults so engaged in changework with RET. More than letting go of symptoms, RET seeks to change the underlying childhood trauma energy involved in adult symptomology. The holistic nature of RET lends itself to strong positive results leading to greater overall health and well-being.

Want a healthy physical body

The authors are Andrea Danese, Terrie E Moffitt, HonaLee Harrington, Barry J Milne, Guilherme Polanczyk, Carmine Pariante, Richie Poulton, Avshalom Caspi.

The study was conducted with colleagues from Duke University, North Carolina, US and Dunedin School of Medicine, New Zealand. It was funded by the UK Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Mental Health and the National Institute on Aging. Dr Danese was a Wellcome Trust Research Training Fellow.

Source: Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Risk Factors for Age-Related Disease, Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. 2009;163[12]:1135-1143.