What the future held: Childhood psychosocial adversity is associated with health deterioration through adulthood in a cohort of British women

Centre for Behaviour and Evolution, Newcastle University, Newcastle, United Kingdom
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.213v1
Subject Areas
Anthropology, Evolutionary Studies, Epidemiology, Women's Health
Keywords
psychosocial acceleration, psychosocial adversity, weathering hypothesis, health, biological embedding, c-reactive protein, life history, humans
Copyright
© 2014 Nettle
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Nettle D. 2014. What the future held: Childhood psychosocial adversity is associated with health deterioration through adulthood in a cohort of British women. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e213v1

Abstract

Childhood psychosocial adversity is associated with accelerated onset of reproductive effort in women. Adaptive explanations for this phenomenon are built on the assumption that greater childhood psychosocial adversity is statistically associated with having a shorter period of healthy adult life during which reproduction will be possible. However, this critical assumption is never actually tested using individual-level longitudinal data. In this study, we revisit a large, longitudinally studied cohort of British women. In an earlier study, we showed that a simple index of psychosocial adversity in the first seven years of life predicted age at first pregnancy in a dose-dependent manner. Here, we show that the same index of adversity predicts accelerated deterioration of health across the potentially reproductive period, and increased levels of the inflammatory biomarker c-reactive protein at age 44. These associations are robust to controlling for adult socioeconomic position, and do not appear to be a consequence of accelerated reproductive strategy, smoking, or BMI. We argue that childhood psychosocial adversity may lead to the lasting embedding of somatic damage that accelerates age-related physical decline. This provides a compelling adaptive rationale for the accelerated reproductive schedules observed in women who experience childhood psychosocial adversity.

Supplemental Information

Supplemental Information 1

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.213v1/supp-1