Childhood Maltreatment Can Leave Scars In The Brain

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/04/242945454/childhood-maltreatment-can-leave-scars-in-the-brain?utm_content=socialflow&utm_campaign=nprfacebook&utm_source=npr&utm_medium=facebook

by Jon Hamilton
November 04, 2013

Maltreatment during childhood can lead to long-term changes in brain circuits that process fear, researchers say. This could help explain why children who suffer abuse are much more likely than others to develop problems like anxiety and depression later on.

Brain scans of teenagers revealed weaker connections between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus in both boys and girls who had been maltreated as children, a team from the University of Wisconsin in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Girls who had been maltreated also had relatively weak connections between the prefrontal cortex the amygdala.

Those weaker connections "actually mediated or led to the development of anxiety and depressive symptoms by late adolescence," says , a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin and one of the study's authors.

Maltreatment can be physical or emotional, and it ranges from mild to severe.

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"Maltreatment is a disorder where often people are not even aware of the extent of their symptoms," Siegle says. So having an objective test would be "a significant advance," he says.

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tags: child abuse