People who experienced trauma during childhood — abuse, neglect or divorce, for example — are more likely to be less healthy adults who die at earlier ages. Several studies have found that. But it has been difficult for scientists to determine whether early adversity leads to those health problems and premature deaths, or whether they’re attributable to other things more common among adults who had tough childhoods, such as a lack of access to medical care or drug use.
A new study published in Nature Communications found that childhood stress leads to early death even in the absence of those other complicating factors — in wild baboons, at least. But the researchers who conducted it think the same might be true for humans, whose DNA is 94 percent similar to baboons’.
To reach this conclusion, a team of researchers from Duke University, Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame turned to a population of baboons in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park that has been observed daily for 45 years.
The zeroed in on 196 female baboons and tallied up how many of six kinds of childhood adversity each experienced. Among the childhood setbacks considered: drought in the first year; loss of a mother before age 4; and a sibling less than 1.5 years younger, which can divert a mother baboon’s attention.
