Childhood maltreatment can have a profound effect on health decades later
By Paul Bolger. Chartered Physiotherapist at Nano Physiotherapy, Kilkenny (www.nanophysio.ie).
We are so malleable when we are young. We soak up everything around us. While we can all learn and adapt throughout life, babies and children tend to soak up experiences at a supercharged rate. This helped our ancestors to survive – the faster that young children learn about the world around them, the better chance they have of survival.
Researchers are learning more and more about the impacts of childhood experience on lifelong health. One group of researchers in the UK, who have been following the life experiences of over 150,000 people, have shown that significant childhood maltreatment increases the rates of long-term health conditions much later in life.
Maltreatment
Now, maltreatment does not mean that a child was not given their way, or that their caregiver was occasionally too tired to give them their full attention. These researchers identified 4 types of maltreatment – physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and neglect.
Maltreatment in childhood was common in this study – with 1-in-3 reporting at least 1 form of maltreatment.
Long-term conditions
The health conditions identified in this study were wide-ranging – including conditions such as heart disease, mental health disorders and pain. These researchers are smart, they are aware that it is common for people who have suffered from trauma in childhood to adopt unhealthy coping strategies or struggle in some aspects of life. They were able to adjust for these variables (like smoking, alcohol use, education level, etc.) to isolate the relationship between childhood maltreatment and health in adult life.
Long-term effects
Childhood maltreatment was found to be associated with a greater risk of adult health problems. Longer duration of maltreatment and a greater number of different types of maltreatment put people at an even higher risk of suffering from a greater number of health issues as adults.
Now, this does not mean that suffering from maltreatment guaranteed somebody future health problems. Just like how smoking doesn’t guarantee lung disease, and not smoking doesn’t protect fully from it. Life is complex – so many factors play a role in our health. However, we can be confident in saying that childhood maltreatment increases the risk of long-term health conditions. How exactly it plays a role, we will explore next week.
Protection from harm
Some people may come through a highly traumatic childhood and lead quite healthy and long lives. What allows some people to thrive while others suffer is complex and multifaceted. Other researchers have shown that having positive experiences throughout childhood and having adults around who are caring helps to buffer children from the negative impacts of abuse.
We will make more sense of this next week – when we will see that adaptation of our inner biology plays a key part in the story of how these experiences ripple down through the years.
If anybody needs support or help with any of the issues raised here, please do inform your GP or local mental health support providers.
