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Sex-Specific Association Between High Traumatic Stress Exposure and Social Cognitive Functioning in Youths.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Traumatic stressful events (TSEs) during childhood and adolescence are associated with increased risk for psychopathology and cognitive impairment. Aberrations in social cognition may contribute to the psychopathology risk. We examined performance differences on social cognitive measures between youths with high TSE exposure and no TSE exposure and how these effects vary in female and male individuals. METHODS:The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort investigates clinical and cognitive phenotypes in a U.S. youth (aged 8-21 years) community population. Here we compared performance in social cognition tasks between youths with high exposure (?3 TSEs, n = 830) and youths with no exposure (n = 5202). Three social cognition tasks were analyzed: 1) age differentiation, 2) emotion identification (happy, sad, angry, fearful, or neutral), and 3) emotion intensity differentiation (happy, sad, angry, and fearful). RESULTS:A significant TSE group by sex interaction was observed in all social cognitive tasks. In the emotion identification task, male subjects with high traumatic stress exposure outperformed nonexposed male subjects; exposure did not affect performance in female subjects. In the emotion intensity differentiation task, female subjects with high traumatic stress exposure performed worse than nonexposed female subjects, with no difference in male subjects between exposure groups. Exploratory analyses revealed that sex differences were driven by improved identification of angry expressions in stress-exposed male subjects and poorer performance in differentiating intensity of happy expressions in stress-exposed female subjects. CONCLUSIONS:Exposure to high levels of early life traumatic stress was associated with sex-specific differences in social cognition. These findings might be related to the sex-specific patterns of psychopathology emerging during adolescence.

SUBMITTER: Barzilay R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6177332 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Sex-Specific Association Between High Traumatic Stress Exposure and Social Cognitive Functioning in Youths.

Barzilay Ran R White Lauren K LK Calkins Monica E ME Moore Tyler M TM Young Jami F JF Wolf Daniel H DH Satterthwaite Theodore D TD Gur Ruben C RC Gur Raquel E RE

Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging 20180622 10

<h4>Background</h4>Traumatic stressful events (TSEs) during childhood and adolescence are associated with increased risk for psychopathology and cognitive impairment. Aberrations in social cognition may contribute to the psychopathology risk. We examined performance differences on social cognitive measures between youths with high TSE exposure and no TSE exposure and how these effects vary in female and male individuals.<h4>Methods</h4>The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort investigates clin ...[more]

PMID: 30041892

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Project description:Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating mental disorder precipitated by trauma exposure. However, only some persons exposed to trauma develop PTSD. There are sex differences in risk; twice as many women as men develop a lifetime diagnosis of PTSD. Methylomic profiles derived from peripheral blood are well-suited for investigating PTSD because DNA methylation (DNAm) encodes individual response to trauma and may play a key role in the immune dysregulation characteristic of PTSD pathophysiology. In the current study, we leveraged recent methodological advances to investigate sex-specific differences in DNAm-based leukocyte composition that are associated with lifetime PTSD. We estimated leukocyte composition on a combined methylation array dataset (483 participants, ∼450 k CpG sites) consisting of two civilian cohorts, the Detroit Neighborhood Health Study and Grady Trauma Project. Sex-stratified Mann-Whitney U test and two-way ANCOVA revealed that lifetime PTSD was associated with significantly higher monocyte proportions in males, but not in females (Holm-adjusted p-val < 0.05). No difference in monocyte proportions was observed between current and remitted PTSD cases in males, suggesting that this sex-specific difference may reflect a long-standing trait of lifetime history of PTSD, rather than current state of PTSD. Associations with lifetime PTSD or PTSD status were not observed in any other leukocyte subtype and our finding in monocytes was confirmed using cell estimates based on a different deconvolution algorithm, suggesting that our sex-specific findings are robust across cell estimation approaches. Overall, our main finding of elevated monocyte proportions in males, but not in females with lifetime history of PTSD provides evidence for a sex-specific difference in peripheral blood leukocyte composition that is detectable in methylomic profiles and that may reflect long-standing changes associated with PTSD diagnosis.

Dataset Information

Sex-Specific Association Between High Traumatic Stress Exposure and Social Cognitive Functioning in Youths.

Publications

Sex-Specific Association Between High Traumatic Stress Exposure and Social Cognitive Functioning in Youths.

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