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How Adversity Affects Development

By: Noah Morales



Introduction:

During my time in my developmental psychology class, we hit on an interesting topic of how adverse childhood experiences affect the development of people in the world. While this fact intuitively felt true, it got me thinking of the real effects that adversity could have on someone growing up. I looked at a few different factors. To start, I was curious about the likelihood of developmental disorders occurring and the correlation between that and adverse conditions. I also looked at pediatric health outcomes and their associations with childhood adversity. 


Pediatric Health Outcomes Associated with Childhood Adversity

Early detection and intervention of childhood adversity has a powerful potential to improve the health and well-being of children. Studies indicated that exposure to childhood adversity was associated with delays in cognitive development, asthma, infection, somatic complaints, sleep disruption, and many other potential disorders. Household dysfunction reported an effect on weight during early childhood and eventually developed into an effect on weight during adolescence. Exposure to childhood adversity was associated with alterations of immune and inflammatory response and stress-related accelerated telomere erosion. 


Things such as abuse, neglect, financial insecurities, and household dysfunction all have an affect on a child’s mind. Furthermore, neurological disorders take place with childhood adversity, which add to overall problems and continue the cycle a child may have. 


Childhood Predictors of Adult Functional Outcomes in ADHD

Results from the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD have shown impairment in functional domains within adults that were diagnosed with ADHD as children.  In a study by Hetchmen et al. (2016),they looked to determine the effects of childhood demographic, clinical, and family factors on adult functional outcomes within people from the treatment study cohort, whether or not they were diagnosed with ADHD as a child.


The results of this study showed that predictors of adult functional outcomes in ADHD included clinical factors like the severity of ADHD, IQ, and comorbidity, as well as demographic factors like household income, parental monitoring, and parental marital problems were comparable for children with or without ADHD. This meant that both ADHD symptoms and adverse conditions were important predictors of adult functional outcomes. By assisting children with lower IQs or those who come from households with low incomes, adult functioning could be improved the same way treatment for ADHD symptoms were as well.


Early Childhood Household Instability and Young Adulthood Depression

Unstable and unpredictable environments are linked to risk for psychopathology, but there are unclear links between neural mechanisms that explain how instability relates to mental health. In a 21 year longitudinal study conducted by Hardi et al (2023.), MRI scans of those who developed under adverse conditions were analyzed. These MRI scans were processed to determine the structural connectivity of different regions of the brain. These scans were then processed as weighted, undirected, and unthresholded in order to generate three weighted global metrics of network architecture, being global efficiency, transitivity, and modularity.


 It was found that greater instability during early childhood was related to greater global efficiency in structural networks, but was not related to clustering or modularity. The association between early instability and global efficiency remained after controlling for harsh parenting, neglect and insecurity. This, in turn, is predicted to have greater depressive symptoms in young adulthood. 


Furthermore, this structural network efficiency indirectly explains the association between depression and instability. Exploratory findings showed that associations with structural connectivity were the strongest within the left frontolateral subregion and between temporal and other subregions were associated with greater instability. Overall, the results showed that instability during childhood was related to a greater structural network efficiency, particularly in areas that are important for regulation and cognition, which has consequences for mental health later in life. 


Conclusion:

Childhood adversity affects brain development and multiple body systems, with the physiological manifestations being detectable in childhood. A history of childhood adversity should be considered during the diagnosis of developmental delay, asthma, recurrent infections that require hospitalizations, somatic complaints, and sleep disruption. The variability that these adverse conditions cause and how children respond to them developmentally is critical to how a child may function. These factors are usually things that are hard to change, so the more insightful a person might be on how people function, the better.


References:

Hardi, Felicia A., et al. “Early childhood household instability, adolescent structural neural network architecture, and young adulthood depression: A 21-year Longitudinal Study.” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 61, June 2023, p. 101253, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2023.101253


Hechtman, Lily, and Arunima Roy. “41.1 adult functional outcomes and their predictors in individuals with childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Results from the long-term follow-up of the multimodal treatment study of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (MTA).” Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 55, no. 10, Oct. 2016, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2016.07.360


Oh, Debora Lee, et al. “Systematic review of pediatric health outcomes associated with childhood adversity.” BMC Pediatrics, vol. 18, no. 1, 23 Feb. 2018, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-018-1037-7

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