Adult Personal Network Characteristics Associated with Early Life Adversity

Early life adversity and adult biological risk profiles.

OBJECTIVES To determine whether there is a relationship between early life adversity (ELA) and biological parameters known to predict health risks and to examine the extent to which circumstances in midlife mediate this relationship. METHODS We analyzed data on 1180 respondents from the biomarker subsample of the second wave of the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States. ...

Early adversity and adult health outcomes.

Adversity in childhood has effects on mental and physical health, not only in childhood but across the lifespan. A chief task of our research has been to define the pathways by which childhood experience has these surprising health outcomes, often decades later. The concept of allostatic load, which refers to dysregulations across major biological regulatory systems that have cumulative interac...

Research Network on Later Life Interventions to Reverse Effects of Early Life Adversity

DNA methylation, behavior and early life adversity.

The impact of early physical and social environments on life-long phenotypes is well known. Moreover, we have documented evidence for gene-environment interactions where identical gene variants are associated with different phenotypes that are dependent on early life adversity. What are the mechanisms that embed these early life experiences in the genome? DNA methylation is an enzymatically-cat...

Testing the biological embedding hypothesis: Is early life adversity associated with a later proinflammatory phenotype?

Accumulating evidence suggests that the experience of early life adversity is a risk factor for a range of poor outcomes across development, including poor physical health in adulthood. The biological embedding model of early adversity (Miller, Chen, & Parker, 2011) suggests that early adversity might become embedded within immune cells known as monocytes/macrophages, programming them to be ove...