Child Abuse May Impact a Person's Brain: Cerebral Grey Matter Abnormalities

Child abuse may actually impact a person long after they've left their childhood behind. Scientists have found that the volume of cerebral grey matter, which is responsible for processing information, actually is impacted by maltreatment.

Child abuse is defined as all forms of physical or emotional maltreatment, sexual abuse, neglect or negligent treatment or commercial or other exploitation. Until now, though, the results of structural neuroimaging studies carried out on these children have been inconsistent. Now, scientists may have found out exactly how childhood maltreatment can impact the brain.

"Childhood maltreatment acts as a severe stressor that produces a cascade of physiological and neurobiological changes that lead to enduring alterations in the brain structure," said Joaquim Radua, one of the researchers, in a news release.

In this case, the scientists conducted a meta-analysis of the voxel based morphometric (VBM) study on childhood maltreatment. VBM is a neuroimaging analysis technique that allows for investigations of focal differences in brain anatomy comparing magnetic brain resonance of two groups of people. In all, the researchers included twelve groups of data from people with a history of childhood maltreatment in addition to other groups that were not exposed to maltreatment.

After analyzing the data, the scientists found that individuals exposed to child abuse had significantly smaller grey matter volumes. This, in particular, could explain the affective and cognitive deficit of people with a history of child abuse.

"Deficits in the right orbitofrontal-temporal-limbic and left inferior frontal regions remained in a subgroup analysis of unmedicated participants, indicating that these abnormalities were not related to medication but to maltreatment," said Radua. "These findings show the serious consequences of adverse childhood environments on brain development. We hope the results of this study will help to reduce environmental risks during childhood and to develop treatments to stabilize these morphologic alterations."

The findings are published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.