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The contribution of childhood adversity to cortisol measures of early life stress amongst infants in rural India: Findings from the early life stress sub-study of the SPRING cluster randomised controlled trial (SPRING-ELS).

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:The majority of the world's children live in low- and middle-income countries and face multiple obstacles to optimal wellbeing. The mechanisms by which adversities - social, cultural, psychological, environmental, economic - get 'under the skin' in the early days of life and become biologically embedded remain an important line of enquiry. We therefore examined the contribution of childhood adversity through pregnancy and the first year of life to hair and salivary cortisol measures of early life stress in the India SPRING home visits cluster RCT which aims to improve early childhood development. METHODS:We assessed 22 adversities across four domains: socioeconomic, maternal stress, family-child relationship, and child and summed them to make a cumulative adversity score & quintiles, and four subscale scores. We cut 3?cm of hair from the posterior vertex and took three saliva samples from morning till late afternoon on each of two days (total six samples). We analysed both for cortisol concentration using ELISA techniques. We used multiple linear regression techniques to assess the relationship between cumulative adversity and log hair cortisol concentration and saliva diurnal slope and area under the curve. RESULTS:We assessed 712 children for hair, and 752 children for saliva cortisol at 12 months of age. We found a strong positive relationship between adversity and hair cortisol; each additional adversity factor was associated with hair cortisol increases of 6.1% (95% CI 2.8, 9.4, p?

SUBMITTER: Bhopal S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6642338 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The contribution of childhood adversity to cortisol measures of early life stress amongst infants in rural India: Findings from the early life stress sub-study of the SPRING cluster randomised controlled trial (SPRING-ELS).

Bhopal Sunil S Verma Deepali D Roy Reetabrata R Soremekun Seyi S Kumar Divya D Bristow Matt M Bhanushali Aparna A Divan Gauri G Kirkwood Betty B

Psychoneuroendocrinology 20190518

<h4>Background</h4>The majority of the world's children live in low- and middle-income countries and face multiple obstacles to optimal wellbeing. The mechanisms by which adversities - social, cultural, psychological, environmental, economic - get 'under the skin' in the early days of life and become biologically embedded remain an important line of enquiry. We therefore examined the contribution of childhood adversity through pregnancy and the first year of life to hair and salivary cortisol me ...[more]

PMID: 31174162

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Project description:IntroductionEarly childhood development is key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and can be negatively influenced by many different adversities including violence in the home, neglect, abuse and parental ill-health. We set out to quantify the extent to which multiple adversities are associated with impaired early childhood growth & development.MethodsThis was a substudy of the SPRING cluster randomised controlled trial covering the whole population of 120 villages of rural India. We assessed all children born from 18 June 2015 for adversities in the first year of life and summed these to make a total cumulative adversity score, and four subscale scores. We assessed the association of each of these with weight-for-age z-score, length-for-age z-score, and the motor, cognitive and language developmental scales of the Bayley Scales of Infant Development III assessed at 18 months.ResultsWe enrolled 1726 children soon after birth and assessed 1273 of these at both 12 and 18 months of age. There were consistent and strongly negative relationships between all measures of childhood adversity and all five child growth & development outcome measures at 18 months of age. For the Bayley motor scale, each additional adversity was associated with a 1.1 point decrease (95%CI -1.3, -0.9); for the cognitive scales this was 0.8 points (95%CI -1.0, -0.6); and for language this was 1.4 points (95%CI -1.9, -1.1). Similarly for growth, each additional adversity was associated with a -0.09 change in weight-for-age z-score (-0.11, -0.06) and -0.12 change in height-for-age z-score (-0.14, -0.09).DiscussionOur results are the first from a large population-based study in a low/middle-income country to show that each increase in adversity in multiple domains increases risk to child growth and development at a very early age. There is an urgent need to act to improve these outcomes for young children in LMICs and these findings suggest that Early Childhood programmes should prioritise early childhood adversity because of its impact on developmental inequities from the very start.

Project description:Context can drastically influence responses to environmental stimuli. For example, a gunshot should provoke a different response at a public park than a shooting range. Little is known about how contextual processing and neural correlates change across human development or about individual differences related to early environmental experiences. Children (N = 60; 8-19 years, 24 exposed to interpersonal violence) completed a context encoding task during fMRI scanning using a delayed match-to-sample design with neutral, happy, and angry facial cues embedded in realistic background scenes. Outside the scanner, participants completed a memory test for context-face pairings. Context memory and neural correlates of context encoding did not vary with age. Larger hippocampal volume was associated with better context memory. Posterior hippocampus was recruited during context encoding, and greater activation in this region predicted better memory for contexts paired with angry faces. Children exposed to violence had poor memory of contexts paired with angry faces, reduced hippocampal volume, and atypical neural recruitment on encoding trials with angry faces, including reduced hippocampal activation and greater functional connectivity between hippocampus and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC). Greater hippocampus-vlPFC connectivity was associated with worse memory for contexts paired with angry faces. Posterior hippocampus appears to support context encoding, a process that does not exhibit age-related variation from middle childhood to late adolescence. Exposure to dangerous environments in childhood is associated with poor context encoding in the presence of threat, likely due to greater vlPFC-dependent attentional narrowing on threat cues at the expense of hippocampus-dependent processing of the broader context.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The ability to use context to guide reactions to environmental stimuli promotes flexible behavior. Remarkably little research has examined how contextual processing changes across development or about influences of the early environment. We provide evidence for posterior hippocampus involvement in context encoding in youth and lack of age-related variation from middle childhood to late adolescence. Children exposed to interpersonal violence exhibited poor memory of contexts paired with angry faces and atypical neural recruitment during context encoding in the presence of threatening facial cues. Heightened attention to threat following violence exposure may come at the expense of encoding contextual information, which may ultimately contribute to pathological fear expressed in safe contexts.

Dataset Information

The contribution of childhood adversity to cortisol measures of early life stress amongst infants in rural India: Findings from the early life stress sub-study of the SPRING cluster randomised controlled trial (SPRING-ELS).

Publications

The contribution of childhood adversity to cortisol measures of early life stress amongst infants in rural India: Findings from the early life stress sub-study of the SPRING cluster randomised controlled trial (SPRING-ELS).

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