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.”
