Mental illnesses in children are so complex that healthcare professionals cannot always detect them. Symptoms for mental disorders can be so nonspecific that even parents cannot tell if their child is being rambunctious or seriously ill.
Children with depressive disorders lack interest in activities they previously enjoyed, criticize themselves and are generally pessimistic and hopeless about the future. They tend have problems at school, a lack of energy, trouble with sleeping, and maybe even stomachaches and headaches. Depressed kids do not look like depressed adults; these kids are often irritable, rather than sad and withdrawn.
Although many of us may experience reactions to stress from time to time, when a child is experiencing child traumatic stress, these reactions interfere with his or her daily life and ability to function and interact with others. In particular, family stressors can take a toll on children, and approximately two-thirds of youth will experience some form of childhood adversity by the age of 18.
But scientists have now discovered that changes in brain networks may help youth adapt to adversity.
A new study reports a neural signature of emotional adaptation that could help researchers understand how the brain adapts to childhood adversity and predict which kids may be vulnerable to developing later psychopathology. Research has primarily focused on how adversity at a young age can lead to mood disorders in adolescence, but most children exhibit resilience to adverse experiences.
Senior author Dr. Marilyn Essex, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, and colleagues followed 132 kids from infancy to 18 years old to search for a neurobiological mechanism of emotional adaptation.
The researchers focused on common types of childhood adversity, such as negative parenting, parental conflict and financial stress that occurred between infancy and 11 years of age. When the youth were 15 to 18 years old, the researchers studied their behavior to look for symptoms of anxiety and depression, defining emotional adaptation as an absence of these symptoms.
They then studied brain responses during emotional processing using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look for associations between brain activity, childhood adversity and emotional adaption. When the adolescents viewed images that evoke negative emotions, those who experienced childhood adversity had a more reactive amygdala, a region of the brain involved in emotion processing.
The researchers also looked at a connection between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, an important circuit for regulating emotion. Childhood adversity was associated with a stronger connection between these brain regions but was reduced in adolescents with high anxiety and depressive symptoms, indicating that perhaps the ability of the brain to strengthen the connection between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex strengthens emotional adaptation.
The findings of this study provide important insight and hope for kids who may experience emotional difficulties as adults, pointing to a neural circuit that may be involved in emotional resilience. Such knowledge could be used as a potential treatment target for individuals suffering from anxiety and depression in the wake of adversity.
