Childhood trauma may leave its mark in blood vessels

LONDON: Young adults who were exposed to adverse experiences as children have greater signs of unhealthy blood vessel function than young people without a traumatic past, a new study finds.

The results suggest that early-life stress may raise the risk of heart disease later on by affecting blood vessel function and blood pressure in ways that can be detected during young adulthood, the authors say.

“We have translated ideas that we had from animal research and found that it’s true in humans,” Jennifer Pollock told Reuters Health.

Pollock, part of the research team, co-directs cardio-renal physiology and medicine in the nephrology division at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

She and her colleagues looked for elevations in blood pressure and other indicators of how well blood vessels constrict or relax, as well as signs of stiffness in blood vessel walls.

“All of this was highly correlated with people who have more of these stresses during childhood than the people who had no stressors in childhood,” she said.

Pollock said that household dysfunction was the most common adverse event, followed by neglect and abuse.

For their study, which was published in the journal Hypertension, Pollock and her colleagues analyzed data on 221 healthy adolescents and young adults recruited for a study of cardiovascular risk factors that started in 1989.

The research team looked at markers of blood vessel health including blood pressure, the heart’s output of blood, characteristics of the pulse and levels of a substance called endothelin-1, a protein that constricts blood vessels and increases blood pressure.

They calculated adverse childhood event (ACE) scores based on a questionnaire answered when the participants were about 21 years old. Those who reported one traumatic event were classified as having mild ACE and those with two or more traumatic events were classified as moderate or severe ACE.

The researchers found that participants who had one traumatic event in childhood had plasma endothelin-1 levels that were an average of 18 percent higher than those who had reported no traumatic events, and those who had two or more traumatic childhood events had levels that were 24 percent higher.

Participants with two or more adverse events also had elevated measures of blood pressure and blood vessel stiffness.

The study didn’t follow up to see if those young people ended up having more heart attacks, strokes or other illnesses. And it cannot prove that the early-life traumas were the cause of the cardiovascular differences.

Nonetheless, Pollock said that in the future she’d like to determine if behavioral therapies may change the course of the cardiovascular risk factors in people who have these early life stressors.

“Exposure to psychosocial stress triggers a biological response aimed at improving adaptation to challenges,” said Dr. Andrea Danese, of the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.

“Although the biological responses to stress are vital in the short term, they may become detrimental when chronically activated,” he told Reuters Health in an email. “For example, immune mediators including inflammation proteins can damage blood vessels leading to atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease.”

Danese, who was not involved in the new study, said researchers are increasingly interested in finding ways to reverse such damage to help individuals who experienced childhood adversity.

“We know little on the topic at present, but once we are able to confidently point to mechanisms through which child stress is translated into biological risk for disease, we will be able to target biological abnormalities before the onset of clinical symptoms,” he said.

This does not necessarily mean giving children medications, he said. “In contrast, we can also use this information to see if psychosocial interventions, such as psychotherapy, could help remediate the detrimental effects of childhood adversity on physical health as they often do for mental health.”

China search vessels find no clues for missing flight

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  AP/CCTV via AP Video In this image taken from video, a member of a Chinese search team uses an instrument to detect electronic pulses while searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, on board the patrol vessel Haixun 01, in the search area in the southern Indian Ocean on Saturday. 
   
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  AP A woman ties a message card for passengers aboard the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, at a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday.

After detecting signals possibly from the black box of the missing Malaysian plane, China’s search vessels failed to find any confirmed clues today to conclusively establish that the pings are from the MH370.

Vessels of China’s ministry of transport searching for the missing passenger jet have searched a total of 136,000 square kilometres by midday on Sunday, Zhuo Li, an official with the China Maritime Search and Rescue Center, said.

The centre had mobilised 62 merchant ships for their assistance in the search, he said.

Haixun 01 of the ministry and two Navy vessels continued the underwater search in southern Indian Ocean, three other ships were searching on the water surface. Two other vessels were searching in eastern Indian Ocean, Mr. Zhuo was quoted by official Xinhua news agency as saying.

China pressed 18 vessels, eight helicopters and three fixed-wing aircraft to trace the plane missing since March 8, along with 239 people on board.

Earlier in the day, three separate but fleeting sounds from deep in the Indian Ocean offered new hope in the hunt for the missing Malaysian airliner, as officials rushed to determine whether they were signals from the plane’s black boxes before their beacons fall silent.

The head of the multinational search being conducted off Australia’s west coast confirmed that a Chinese ship had picked up electronic pulsing signals twice in a small patch of the search zone, once on Friday and again on Saturday.

On Sunday, an Australian ship carrying sophisticated deep-sea sound equipment picked up a third signal in a different part of the massive search area.

“This is an important and encouraging lead, but one which I urge you to treat carefully,” retired Australian Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search, told reporters in Perth.

“We have an acoustic event. The job now is to determine the significance of that event. It does not confirm or deny the presence of the aircraft locator on the bottom of the ocean,” Mr. Houston said, referring to each of the three transmissions.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday that the patrol vessel Haixun 01 on Friday detected a “pulse signal” at 37.5 kilohertz (cycles per second) the same frequency emitted by flight data recorders aboard the missing plane in the southern Indian Ocean.

The British Navy ship HMS Echo, which is fitted with sophisticated sound-locating equipment, is moving to the area where the signals were picked up and will be there in the next day or two, Houston said.

The Australian navy’s Ocean Shield, which is carrying high-tech sound detectors from the U.S. Navy, will also head there, but will first investigate the sound it picked up in its current region, about 300 nautical miles (555 kilometres) away, he said.

Australian air force assets are also being deployed into the Haixun 01’s area to try to confirm or discount the signals’ relevance to the search, Houston said.

In Kuala Lumpur, families of passengers aboard the missing plane attended a prayer service on Sunday that also drew thousands of Malaysian sympathizers.

“This is not a prayer for the dead because we have not found bodies. This is a prayer for blessings and that the plane will be found,” said Liow Tiong Lai, the president of the government coalition party that organized the two-hour session.

Two Chinese women were in tears and hugged by their caregivers after the rally. Many others looked somber, and several wore white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Pray for MH370”.

Two-thirds of the passengers aboard Flight 370 were Chinese, and a group of relatives has been in Kuala Lumpur for most of the past month to follow the investigation. Mr. Liow said some of them were planning to go home on Sunday.

After weeks of fruitless looking, the multinational search team is racing against time to find the sound-emitting beacons and cockpit voice recorders that could help unravel the mystery of the plane. The beacons in the black boxes emit “pings” so they can be more easily found, but the batteries last for only about a month.

Investigators believe Flight 370 veered way off-course and came down somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, though they have not been able to explain why it did so.

The crew of the Chinese ship reportedly picked up the signals using a hand-held sonar device called a hydrophone dangled over the side of a small runabout something experts said was technically possible but extremely unlikely.

The equipment aboard the Ocean Shield and the HMS Echo are dragged slowly behind each ship over long distances and are considered far more sophisticated than those the Chinese crew was using.

Footage aired on China’s state-run CCTV showed crew members in the small boat with a device shaped like a large soup can attached to a pole. It was hooked up by cords to electronic equipment in a padded suitcase as they poked the device into the water.

“If the Chinese have discovered this, they have found a new way of finding a needle in a haystack,” said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com. “Because this is amazing. And if it proves to be correct, it’s an extraordinarily lucky break.”

There are many clicks, buzzes and other sounds in the ocean from animals, but the 37.5 kilohertz pulse was selected for underwater locator beacons because there is nothing else in the sea that would naturally make that sound, said William Waldock, an expert on search and rescue who teaches accident investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.

“They picked that (frequency) so there wouldn’t be false alarms from other things in the ocean,” he said.

But after weeks of false alarms, officials were careful on Sunday not to overplay the development.

“We are hopeful but by no means certain,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said of the detection of the signals.

“This is the most difficult search in human history. We need to be very careful about coming to hard and fast conclusions too soon,” Mr. Abbott told reporters during a visit to Japan.

The agency was formally told about the second Chinese detection on Saturday “in absolutely the normal way”, he said.

“China is sharing everything that is relevant to this search. Everything,” Mr. Houston said.

Still, the search agency will be adding a Chinese-speaking liaison officer “to make sure nothing falls through the cracks,” he said.

The signals detected by the Chinese ship were in the southern high priority zone, Mr. Houston said.

Up to 12 military and civilian planes and 13 ships took part in the search on Sunday of three areas totalling about 216,000 square kilometres (83,400 square miles). The areas are about 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) northwest of the Australian west coast city of Perth.

China blocking Philippines’ vessels a provocative move: US

Concerned by reports that China has blocked two vessels of the Philippines in the South China Sea, the US on Wednesday described it as a provocative move that raised tensions.
“We are troubled by reports that China’s Coast Guard blocked efforts by two Filipino vessels to re-supply the Philippines’ outpost at Second Thomas Shoal. This is a provocative move that raises tensions,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said.
“Pending resolution of competing claims in the South China Sea, there should be no interference with the efforts of claimants to maintain the status quo,” she said.
The Philippines has maintained a presence at Second Thomas Shoal since 1999, as other claimants have maintained a presence elsewhere in the South China Sea, she added.
“The regular resupply and rotation of personnel positioned in the South China Sea at locations that have existed since before the Declaration of Conduct in the South China Sea was issued by ASEAN and China in 2002 is consistent with maintenance of the status quo. Other claimants regularly resupply and repair their outposts without interference,” Psaki said.
“Freedom of navigation and overflight is a linchpin of security in the Pacific. Safe and unimpeded lawful commerce, freedom of navigation, stability, and respect for international law must be maintained,” said the spokesperson.