14 DAY TRIAL // A new research carried out by a team led by psychiatrists at Brown University and Butler Hospital, found out that adults that look completely healthy, could be suffering from a high inflammatory response to stress, if they were abused or neglected during their childhood.
Before getting to this serious conclusion, the scientists experimented on 69 adults, aged from their late teens to the early 60s.
They made sure that the subjects were not psychologically disturbed and they did not take any drugs or medicines that could bias the results, before asking them a series of questions about their childhood experiences.
19 individuals reported having suffered from moderate to severe neglect or abuse during their childhood.
After the background check, in order to measure each group's inflammatory response to stress, the scientists asked them to participate in a laboratory role-play called the Trier Social Stress Test.
The subjects had to appear before a panel of judges and talk about their qualifications for their job before counting backward from a number by 13s.
All these experiments had one goal: measuring the subjects' vital signs and collecting blood samples.
The results showed that people who had an unfortunate childhood, had high concentrations of interleukin-6 in their blood, that were always higher than those of the control group.
Previous research has already revealed associations between inflammatory markers like cytokines or interleuken-6, and anxiety disorders and depression, according to lead author Linda Carpenter, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior, who also treats patients with mood disorders at Butler.
“Animal models have given us some signals about how the functioning of an organism's stress response system can run amok for the rest its life as a result of some of the earliest environment exposures — adverse ones in particular.
“This is one of a number of studies we've been doing with generally healthy adults, looking at the effects of adverse early environment and how it might create a biological abnormality that could predispose somebody to future depression or another medical disorders,” she added.
This new research could contribute to improve doctors' understanding of how childhood stress can determine the same condition later in life.
But Carpenter added that “we're not yet at a point,where we can say to healthy people 'Go get your stress-test cytokine profile done' as a tool to prevent, diagnose, or treat medical disorders," she said.
“But what's clear is that a life of excessive stress-induced inflammatory chemicals in your bloodstream is unlikely to be a good thing.”
Further research is necessary for exploring the link between the functioning of the immune system and depression, and new discoveries in this domain could lead to coming up with a blood test that will estimate a patient's risk of developing depression or other medical disorders.
This research was published online in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.