Childhood Trauma Effects

EFFECTS OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA ON THE BRAIN.

People who suffer a traumatic childhood most often grow up scarred from the experience. They suffer both psychological and emotional distress from the memories hanging around their minds from the traumatic experience. These kind of people often times have the most tendencies to suffer from depression, self isolation and even the likelihood of suicide as a result of their childhood experience.

Studies have been made into why childhood trauma affects the adult life of its victim. But now, researchers have begun to reveal what happens in the brain following this kind of trauma. Trauma can cause lasting changes in the areas of the brain that deal with stress, namely the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal

White matter affected after childhood abuse.

Various previous studies has pointed out that individuals who experienced neglect and abuse as children have a decreased volume of white matter in various areas of the brain.

White matter consists in myelinated axons, which are the projections of nerve cells allowing electric impulses travel around and carry information, while myelin is the isolating coating in which these tracts are sheathed. Myelin helps these electrical impulses to travel faster, allowing information to propagate efficiently from the brain to the nervous system.

The volume and structure of white matter correlate with a person's capacity to learn and this component of the brain continues to develop throughout early adulthood unlike gray matter. In addition to this changes in the brain of victims of childhood trauma, further post mortem researches has been conducted by collecting brain samples of people who likely died from trauma and suicide to study their

Of these people, 27 had been at one time diagnosed with depression and had undergone severe abuse in their childhood, 25 had been diagnosed with depression but had no history of childhood abuse, and 26 had not been diagnosed with any mental disorder and had no history of child abuse.

The brain tissue of the three groups were studies and comparison were made. From their studies it showed that People who had undergone abuse as children exhibited thinner myelin coating in a large percentage of nerve fibers. This was not the case for the other two brain sample types studied.

Researchers also noted that abnormal development at a molecular level specifically impacted the cells involved in the production and maintenance of myelin, which are called oligodendrocytes .

Connectivity of key brain areas impacted

Their studies also discovered that some of the largest axons affected were unusually thickened. They say that these peculiar alterations may all act together to negatively impact the connectivity between the anterior cingulate cortex , which is a region of the brain implicated in processing emotions and cognitive functioning, and associated areas of the