Childhood trauma is associated with altered brain responses to stress
PUBLISHED: 21 November 2023 – McGill University
Do adults with a history of childhood trauma have altered brain responses to psychological challenges? Previous studies indicated that this can occur in laboratory animals, but it has been unclear whether it occurs in humans.
Now a team of scientists, led by Marco Leyton at McGill University, have found evidence that exposure to childhood adversity is associated with an altered ability to process stressful challenges and other emotional material. These effects might diminish the ability to cope with threatening events, increasing the risk for psychiatric disorders later in life.
“By integrating the results from 83 previous brain imaging studies, we were able to provide what is arguably the clearest evidence to date that adults who have been exposed to early life trauma have different brain responses to psychological challenges,” says Marco Leyton, Full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. “This includes exaggerated responses in a region that processes emotionally intense information (the amygdala), and reduced responses in a region that helps people regulate emotions and associated behaviors (the frontal cortex),” adds Leyton, who is the Director of the Temperament Adversity Biology Lab (TAB Lab) at McGill.
Read the full story on the McGill newsroom website
About the study
“Adverse life experiences and brain function: a meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging findings“ by Niki Hosseini-Kamkar, Mahdieh Varvani Farahani, Maja Nikolic, Kaycee Stewart, Samantha Goldsmith, Mahdie Soltaninejad, Reza Rajabli, Cassandra Lowe, Andrew A. Nicholson, Bruce Morton, Marco Leyton, was published in JAMA Network Open.
