Long Term Effects of Early Stressful Life Experiences

Recent research has focused on the long term effects of early stressors, including those experienced in early childhood, on disease later in life. Some of this work has been prompted by the allostatic load view of stress, which argues that major, chronic, or recurrent stress dysregulaties stress systems, which, over time, can produce accumulating risk for disease.

Chronic abuse in childhood or adulthood has long been known to increase a broad array of health risks because it results in intense, chronic stress that taxes physiological systems. It is now clear that even more modest family stress can increase risk for disease as well. Researchers reported that "risky families"-that is, families that are high in conflict r abuse and low in warmth and nurturance-produce offspring with problems in stress regulatory systems. By virtue of having to cope with a chronically stressful family environment, children from such families may develop heightened sympathetic reactivity to stressors and exaggerated cortisol responses. Moreover, by virtue of exposure to chronic stress early in life, the developing stress systems themselves may become dysregulated, such that physiological and neuroendoccrine stress responses across the life span are affected by these early experiences. Because these stress stems and their dysfunctions are implicated in a broad array of s=diseases, it should not be surprising that an early major stressful event would produce damage later in life. The evidence for this position is quite substantial.

For example, in a retrospective study, researchers asked adults to complete a questionnaire regarding their early family environment tar inquired among other things, how warm and supportive the environment was versus how cold, critical, hostile, or conflict-ridden it was. The more of these problems these adults reported from their childhood, the more vulnerable they were in adulthood to an array of disorders, including depression, lung disease, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. At least some of the risk may have occurred not only because of poor health habits, such as smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise that these early stressful environments prompted.

Of course, there are potential problems with retrospective accounts. People who are depressed or ill, for example, may be especially likely to regard their childhoods as traumatic or stressful. However , substantial evidence from prospective longitudinal investigations supports many of these conclusions, and consequently distortions in reconstruction of one's childhood family environment may not account for the result.

Other research similarly shows the delayed impact on later illness that stress can have. For example, men who had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder from combat experience during the Vietnam War were found in older age to have significantly higher risk for circulatory, digestive, musculoskeletal, metabolic, nervous system, and respiratory disorders.