Building Healthy Adults Starts in Childhood

From Medscape Medical News > Psychiatry Megan Brooks December 28, 2011 — Extensive evidence indicates that early childhood adversity and “toxic stress” have harmful effects on mental and physical health that can last a lifetime, warns a new technical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). In an accompanying policy statement, the AAP advocates incorporating the growing scientific knowledge base that links childhood adversity to lifelong harm into the training of all current and future physicians. The report and policy statement were published online December 26 and will appear in the January 2012 print issue of Pediatrics. "Potentially Transformational" Drawing on multiple lines of investigation in biological, behavioral, and social sciences, the authors of the technical report present an ecobiodevelopmental (EBD) framework that illustrates how early childhood experiences and environmental influences can shape lifelong learning, behavior, and health. The authors summarize what they call “extensive evidence” linking early adversity to later impairments in learning, behavior, and physical and mental well-being. The implications of this EBD framework for the practice of medicine are “potentially transformational,” Jack P. Shonkoff, MD, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues note in the report. It suggests that many adult diseases “should be viewed as developmental disorders that begin early in life and that persistent health disparities associated with poverty, discrimination, or maltreatment could be reduced by the alleviation of toxic stress in childhood,” they write. In the accompanying policy statement, the AAP says, “All health care professionals should adopt the proposed EBD framework as a means of understanding the social, behavioral, and economic determinants of lifelong disparities in physical and mental health.” Pediatrics. 2012;129: Published online December 26, 2011. Report, Policy Statement