Abuse Victims More Stress-Sensitive
B O S T O N, Aug. 1 -- The horror of childhood abuse can often linger for a lifetime, with higher rates of depression, anxiety and drug abuse found among abuse survivors. But researchers have never fully understood why.
Now, a group of psychiatrists at Emory University are exploring the biological basis for that heightened vulnerability, hoping to develop new drug therapies that could assuage — and even prevent — it.
“We know that adults who were victims of child abuse are more prone to depression and anxiety problems,” says Dr. Jeffrey Newport, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Emory University’s School of Medicine in Atlanta. “We wanted to investigate what might be underlying that vulnerability, and, down the road, provide some protection.”
In a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers led by Dr. Charles Nemeroff, also of Emory University, examined a small group of 49 women, ages 18 to 45.
The women fell into four separate categories: women who had been physically or sexually abused as children and currently suffered from depression; women who had been abused but were not currently depressed; women who had not been abused as children but currently had depression; and women who had not been abused and were not depressed.
Stress Test
All the women were subjected to a simulated “social stress test,” where they performed math problems and a mock job interview in front of an audience while having their heart rates and their levels of stress hormones monitored.
“Both groups of women who were abused, depressed or not, had elevated stress hormones,” Newport says. “Our interpretation is that the early life abuse sensitizes a stress system. Once a new stress situation occurs, those individuals are more sensitized to the effects of the situation.”
All of us have a certain vulnerability to stress that, once exceeded, can manifest itself in illness, such as depression or anxiety. But for these women, researchers say, the threshold of how much stress they can tolerate has been lowered; the abuse has rewired their stress hormonal systems to be either hyperactive or oversensitive.
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