Researchers: Child abuse, neglect can trigger permanent brain damage

By Troy Goodman
CNN.com Health Writer

(CNN) -- Child abuse and neglect can "rewire" the nascent brain, scientists have found, which may lead to psychological problems throughout adulthood.

"These changes are permanent," said Dr. Martin Teicher of Mclean Hospital, a psychiatric center affiliated with Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. "This is not something people can just get over with and get on with their lives."

In a report published in the journal Cerebrum, Teicher analyzed the largest and most detailed study on how childhood experiences affect brain development. He used high-tech brain imaging on several hundred children and adults to identify four types of brain abnormalities -- all of which were linked to child abuse and neglect.

The abuse-related brain damage appears to foster such problems as adult aggressiveness, depression, anxiety and even memory and attention impairment. The report confirms smaller studies showing that the brain "rewires" itself in response to trauma.

"A child's interactions with the outside environment causes connections to form between brain cells," said Teicher, who heads McLean's Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program. "These connections are pruned during puberty and adulthood. So whatever a child experiences, for good or bad, helps determine how his brain is wired."

Previous experiments with monkeys raised without their mothers have already linked depression, schizophrenia, autism and attention deficit disorders to childhood maltreatment, according to other experts.

There is even a growing body of evidence concerning "a history of childhood abuse among adolescents who later commit violent crimes," according to Teicher's report.

Other doctors were quick to point out that positive parental support -- and sometimes even psychotherapy -- can help normalize brain function. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, for instance, can be treated with a field of treatment known as cognitive behavioral therapy.

Then there is the idea that many people actually flourish despite childhood trauma. In other words, many youngsters "move on and get past it," said Michael Howell, the development director for Dallas, Texas-based Kid Net Foundation, a nonprofit group devoted to drug-exposed infants and children who suffer abuse, neglect and abandonment

"Something, someone, somehow -- be it an extended family, a church group or whatever -- has touched them and helped them continue on in a normal way," Howell said.

Among the differences Teicher and his researchers found between normal brains and the brains of those abused or neglected in childhood is a condition called limbic irritability. The brain's limbic system controls many of the most fundamental emotions.

But after studying 253 adults who came to an outpatient mental health clinic for psychiatric assessment, the researchers found more than half reported being physically and/or sexually abused as children. Those that had been abused tested positive on a measure of their brain wave activity that looks for disturbances in the limbic system.

Other findings linked abuse to poor development of the "verbal" hemisphere of the brain, Teicher said, along with disruption in the cerebral communication that goes on between the two hemispheres of the human brain.

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Child abuse a growing problem, report says
September 18, 1996

Kid Net Foundation
Dana Alliance - Brain Research
McLean Hospital

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