Early life trauma, post‐traumatic stress disorder, and allostatic load in a sample of American Indian adults

Zaneta M. Thayer · Celestina Barbosa‐Leiker · Michael G. McDonell · Lonnie A. Nelson · Dedra Buchwald · Spero M. Manson

79 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Journal of Human Biology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Child Abuse and Trauma Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: Among American Indians, prior research has found associations between early life trauma and the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adulthood. Given the physiological changes associated with PTSD, early life trauma could indirectly contribute to chronic disease risk. However, the impact of early life trauma on adult physical health in this population has not been previously investigated. METHODS: We evaluated associations among early life trauma, PTSD, and 13 physiological biomarkers that index cardiovascular, metabolic, neuroendocrine, anthropometric, and immune function in adulthood by conducting correlation and structural equation modeling path analyses (N = 197). Physiological systems were analyzed individually as well as in a composite measure of allostatic load. RESULTS: We found early life trauma was related to PTSD, which in turn was related to elevated allostatic load in adulthood. Among the various components of allostatic load, the neuroendocrine system was the only one significantly related to early life stress and subsequent PTSD development. CONCLUSIONS: Changes in allostatic load might reflect adaptive adjustments that maximize short-term survival by enhancing stress reactivity, but at a cost to later health. Interventions should focus on improving access to resources for children who experience early life trauma in order to avoid PTSD and other harmful sequelae.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 79 citations exist upstream.

References

2005“Weathering” and Age Patterns of Allostatic Load Scores Among Blacks and Whites in the United States 2011Adverse childhood experiences, allostasis, allostatic load, and age-related disease 2001Effective Treatments for PTSD: Practice Guidelines from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies 2009Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory 2012The physical health consequences of PTSD and PTSD symptoms: A meta-analytic review 2010The role of early life stress as a predictor for alcohol and drug dependence 2010Socio‐economic differentials in peripheral biology: Cumulative allostatic load 2012A Systematic Review of Allostatic Load, Health, and Health Disparities

Cited by

2020What’s love got to do with it? “Love” and alcohol use among U.S. Indigenous peoples: Aligning research with real-world experiences 2020Why Are So Many Indigenous Peoples Dying and No One Is Paying Attention? Depressive Symptoms and “Loss of Loved Ones” as a Result and Driver of Health Disparities 2024Frailty or resilience? Hazard-based and cumulative phenotype approaches to discerning signals of health inequality in medieval London 2022Stress in bioarchaeology, epidemiology, and evolutionary medicine: an integrated conceptual model of shared history from the descriptive to the developmental

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.