Early adversity leaves lasting molecular imprint across the body: primate study

The study looked at 237 rhesus macaques. I can only read the abstract, which doesn't clarify how they determined their early life adversity.

The abstract doesn't make very strong claims about how much an impact they saw, only that they started to see some patterns emerge.

The patterns were also not even consistent in the same direction, with some of their measurements correlating adversity with changes that "looked like" the opposite of accelerated aging.

> "In some cases, adversity-related changes looked like accelerated aging. In others, they went in the opposite direction," explained co-lead author Rachel Petersen

I would like to read the full paper, but this feels like there are several layers of PR speak on top of what they were studying.

Many factors can impact the markers they're measuring, including body size, so this paper shouldn't be used as evidence that we can measure trauma directly or anything like that. They were searching for patterns and differences, but there isn't a clear or even uni-directional link with adversity.

So the body does keep the score?

I once listened to a scientific presentation that was interesting, but I don't remember the professor's name or whether his hypotheses have panned out long-term. That said, he flipped the script on the usual take on research trying to understand why some people respond to early adversity by going off the rails while others seem to trek through it relatively unaffected with positive outcomes. Usually the research focus had been on what differed in a person who would withstand the adversity without asking whether there was a tradeoff for the decreased vulnerability to early adversity. He then went on and presented initial evidence that, on the hand, the individuals that can do all right no matter what, they tended to never particularly excel, while on the other hand, individuals sensitive to early adversity tended to either crash hard or soar higher.

The idea was, thinking about species fitness, it made sense for some of the population that can make it through the hard times, and some of the population that can really take advantage of the good times, even if that meant very poor outcomes in the bad times...It's a hedging-like evolutionary strategy to try to make the most, at the population level, with what you are given.

Anyway, I found it provacative to think about.

Maybe colleges and scholarships that make admission decisions based on adversity can someday objectively measure it by DNA methylation. Also for reparations or welfare benefits. It would seem to be a more direct proxy than melanin pigment density.

But on the other hand, adversity does not equal disadvantage, and in fact the trials that leave those marks -- beneath some threshold -- may bestow an advantage over unstressed peers. Like released hatchery fish have ~10% of the survival rate of wild fish.

A low methylation score could be interpreted as a call to mature a child's tissues more rapidly by the curated application of adversity.

In a nutshell, is this basically "stress the part and it wears out faster"?

Whats the pitfall when research like this doesn't account for side effects like if you had early adversity, usually your nutrition, physical environment can also have a big impact across your body, vs people without adversity and had bad nutrition/enviroment.

My parents were born in 1949 korea and I recently realized (thru talking to AI) that that's probably why they were/are so fucked up. Basically first 4 years of their lives were surrounded by destruction, death, like Gaza right now. Then after that an upbringing in famine and authoritarianism. Body keeps the score, eh.

> In this study, researchers developed highly precise tissue-specific clocks, capable of predicting age within about one year of an individual's chronological age.

So if all of this adversity related difference doesn't even throw off the chronological calculation of age by more than a year, how significant is it? Certainly there could be other effects beyond just aging, but is there any evidence of the actual effect size here?

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