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Clinical Trial
. 2013 Oct 15;110(42):17149-53.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1315458110. Epub 2013 Sep 23.

Childhood abuse, parental warmth, and adult multisystem biological risk in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study

Judith E Carroll  1 , Tara L Gruenewald, Shelley E Taylor, Denise Janicki-Deverts, Karen A Matthews, Teresa E Seeman
Affiliations
Clinical Trial

Childhood abuse, parental warmth, and adult multisystem biological risk in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults study

Judith E Carroll et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

Childhood abuse increases adult risk for morbidity and mortality. Less clear is how this "toxic" stress becomes embedded to influence health decades later, and whether protective factors guard against these effects. Early biological embedding is hypothesized to occur through programming of the neural circuitry that influences physiological response patterns to subsequent stress, causing wear and tear across multiple regulatory systems. To examine this hypothesis, we related reports of childhood abuse to a comprehensive 18-biomarker measure of multisystem risk and also examined whether presence of a loving parental figure buffers against the impact of childhood abuse on adult risk. A total of 756 subjects (45.8% white, 42.7% male) participated in this ancillary substudy of the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study. Childhood stress was determined by using the Risky Families Questionnaire, a well-validated retrospective self-report scale. Linear regression models adjusting for age, sex, race, parental education, and oral contraceptive use found a significant positive relationship between reports of childhood abuse and multisystem health risks [B (SE) = 0.68 (0.16); P < 0.001]. Inversely, higher amounts of reported parental warmth and affection during childhood was associated with lower multisystem health risks [B (SE) = -0.40 (0.14); P < 0.005]. A significant interaction of abuse and warmth (P < 0.05) was found, such that individuals reporting low levels of love and affection and high levels of abuse in childhood had the highest multisystem risk in adulthood.

Keywords: allostatic load; childhood adversity; disease risk.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Simple slopes of childhood abuse predicting allostatic load for 1 SD below the mean of parental warmth (low), the mean of parental warmth (mean), and 1 SD above the mean of parental warmth (high), adjusted for age, sex, race, parental education, OCU, and adult SES.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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