[Photo by Derek Keats]
What is true for humans is also true for baboons: The tougher the childhood, the higher the risks of premature death later in life.
Numerous studies have shown that childhood trauma can have far-reaching effects on adult health and survival; new research finds the same is true for wild baboons.
People who experience childhood abuse, neglect and other hallmarks of a rough childhood are more likely to develop heart disease, diabetes and other health problems later in life, even after the stressful events have passed, previous research shows.
A new study from the University of Notre Dame, Duke University and Princeton University finds that wild baboons that experience multiple misfortunes during the first years of life, such as drought or the loss of their mother, grow up to live much shorter adult lives. Their life expectancy is cut short by up to 10 years compared with their more fortunate peers.
The "bad luck" babies not only lost more than 10 years off their adult lives, they also had fewer surviving offspring.
"It's like a snowball effect," said Elizabeth Archie, associate professor of biological sciences at Notre Dame and a co-author of the study.
The findings, which appear online in Nature Communications, come from a long-term study of 196 wild female baboons monitored on a nearly daily basis between 1983 and 2013 near Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya. The results are important because they show that early adversity can have long-term negative effects on survival even in the absence of factors commonly evoked to explain similar patterns in humans, such as differences in smoking, drinking or medical care, said Jenny Tung, an assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology and biology at Duke who co-authored the study.
[For more of this story go to http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_...4/uond-atc042016.php]
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