How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime

Lisa Lowe

5 years ago

Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. An impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on.

This video was produced by TEDMED.

https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime?

“We now understand, better than we have before, how exposure to early adversity effects the developing brain and bodies of children. It effects areas like the nucleus accumbens –the pleasure and reward center of the brain, that is implicated in substance dependence… There are real neurological reasons, why folks exposed to high doses of adversity, are more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors.”