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BU to Study Adverse Childhood Experiences, Later Life Health Outcomes [eurekalert.org]

 

By Boston University School of Medicine, EurekAlert!, August, 21, 2019

Lewina Lee, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and clinical research psychologist at the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston, has received a five-year, $3.5 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute on Aging to establish the Boston Early Adversity and Mortality Study (BEAMS).

Lee, along with co-principal investigator Daniel Mroczek, PhD, professor of medical social sciences and director of the Lifespan Personality and Health Lab at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, will build a unique "cradle-to-grave" dataset that tracks the life span of three Boston-based cohorts of men who have been followed by researchers for over half a century, and augment the dataset with information on their siblings. Using this rich dataset, the study team will evaluate whether and how childhood adversity in the socioeconomic, environmental and psychosocial domains bring about Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, cardiometabolic disease and premature death in later life.

"Scientists have been unable to fully understand the effects of early adversity on later-life health in large part because there is inadequate 'lifespan data' collected from birth to death to help map the sequelae of early adversity over age," said Lee. Bringing together three of the longest-running studies of adult lives, BEAMS will further enrich these studies with prospective information on early-life circumstances and later-life health through linkages to multiple administrative databases, such as Decennial Census, hospital birth records, and military records. "Given the wealth of mid- and later-life data we have already collected on these cohorts over decades, the cradle-to-grave dataset created in BEAMS will afford rare opportunities to test exceptionally long-term, explanatory pathways from early adversity to later-life health," explained Mroczek.

[Please click here to read more.]

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