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Childhood abuse leaves a scar on the brain, a new neuroimaging study led by UCLA psychologists has shown. The researchers found associations between the severity of different maltreatment exposures and cortical thickness, surface area and subcortical volume based on MRI images of individuals. The effect was more pronounced in young women than in men or in children. The study is the largest of its kind to examine the neurobiological legacy of childhood maltreatment across a diverse, global sample of people.

"We know that childhood maltreatment is a major risk factor for many stress-related disorders, including major depressive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder, and we wanted to know if there was what amounted to a neurobiological scar associated with these adverse experiences," said UCLA psychology professor Tiffany Ho, the corresponding author of the study, which is published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Much of the neuroimaging research in this area has focused on the cumulative effects of multiple exposures in individuals exposed to childhood maltreatment. But during childhood, the brain is still developing many of its major neural networks and is especially sensitive to environmental inputs, a situation known as heightened plasticity. Contextual influences can therefore have an outsized effect on how the brain develops during these sensitive periods. The researchers therefore suspected that abuse might affect the physical structure of the brain in ways related to developmental timing.

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