According to a Psychology Today "Diagnosis Dictionary" entry, more children suffer from neglect in the U.S. than from physical and sexual abuse combined.

During 2005, 62.8 percent of victims experienced neglect, 16.6 percent were physically abused, 9.3 percent were sexually abused, 7.1 percent were emotionally or psychologically maltreated, and 2.0 percent were medically neglected.

Unlike child sexual abuse, where girls are more likely to be victims (based on reporting - there might be more "equality" here than statistics indicate), neglect is equal opportunity, with only a slight difference (2003) between girls (50.7%) and boys (47.3%) - it's unclear where the other 2% fall. Another study (2001) found boys accounting for 48.6 percent and girls accounting for 51.1 percent.

We have known for quite some time that neglect has serious impacts on brain development. Rene Spitz showed the effects of neglect on infant attachment in his foundling home studies. Spitz (1945) compared 61 infants living in a foundling home to 69 infants living in a nursery. The foundling home contained children given up by un-wed mothers whereas the nursery contained children of delinquent girls.

In the foundling homes there was very little to no interaction with adults, few things with which to play, and most of the infants' time is spent in cribs with extremely limited visual stimulation. In the nursery, however, infants were cared for by mothers or foster mothers, they were given toys, and the cribs allowed for visual stimulation. Spitz found that the Developmental Quotient for foundling home babies was averaged at 72, while for the nursery babies the Developmental Quotient was averaged at 105.

More recent research, with the aid of brain imaging, reveals that - among other issues - the mass of the corpus callosum was reduced by 15%–18% (Teicher, et al, 2004) in neglected children. I am particularly interested, however, in how neglect (or the corresponding inflammation from the stress response) impacts myelination.


This article is from Wired Science in 2012, but it remains relevant and informative. The original article is here:

Full Citation:  
Makinodan, M, Rosen, KM, Ito, S, and Corfas, G. (2012, Sep 14). A Critical Period for Social Experience–Dependent Oligodendrocyte Maturation and Myelination. Science, Vol. 337 No. 6090.

How Childhood Neglect Stunts the Brain

By Brandon Keim
09.13.12 | Wired Science


Photo: D. Sharon Pruitt/Flickr

Science is painting a dramatic picture of how childhood neglect damages developing brains, so stunting them that neglect might be likened to physically violent abuse.

The latest addition to this research narrative comes from a study of mice placed in isolation early in their lives, an experiment that, on its surface, might seem redundant: After all, we already know that neglect is bad for humans, much less mice.

But they key to the study is in the details. The researchers found striking abnormalities in tissues that transmit electrical messages across the brain, suggesting a specific mechanism for some of the dysfunctions seen in neglected human children.

“This is very strong evidence that changes in myelin cause some of the behavioral problems caused by isolation,” said neurologist Gabriel Corfas of Harvard Medical School, a co-author of the new study, released Sept. 13 in Science.

Corfas and his team, led by fellow Harvard Med neuroscientist Manabu Makinodan, put 21-day-old mice in isolation for two weeks, then returned them to their colonies. When the mice reached adolescence, the researchers compared their brains and behavior to mice who hadn’t been isolated.

The isolated mice were antisocial, with striking deficits in memory. Their myelin, a cell layer that forms around neuronal networks like insulation around wires, was unusually thin, especially in the prefrontal cortex, a brain region central to cognition and personality.

'The first years of life are crucially important for brain architecture.'Similar patterns of behavior have been seen, again and again, in children raised in orphanages or neglected by parents, as have changes to a variety of brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex. The myelin deficiencies identified by Corfas and Makinodan may underlie these defects.

“This is incredibly important data, because it gives us the neural mechanisms associated with the deleterious changes in the brain” that arise from neglect, said Nathan Fox, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Maryland.

Fox was not involved in the new study, but is part of a research group working on a long-term study of childhood neglect that is scientifically striking and poignantly tragic. Led by Harvard Medical School pediatricians Charles Nelson and Margaret Sheridan, the project has tracked for the last 12 years children who started their lives in an orphanage in Bucharest, Romania, a country infamous for the spartan, impersonal conditions of its orphanages.

Among children who spent their first two years in the orphanage, the researchers observed high levels developmental problems, cognitive deficits, mental illness, and significant reductions in brain size. When the researchers measured the sheer amount of electrical activity generated by the brains of children who’d been isolated as toddlers, “it was like you’d had a rheostat, a dimmer, and dimmed down the amount of energy in these institutionalized children,” said Fox.

These problems persisted even when toddlers were later adopted, suggesting a crucial importance for those early years in setting a life’s neurological trajectory. “There’s a sensitive period for which, if a child is taken out of an institution, the effects appear to be remediated, and after which remediation is very, very difficult,” Fox said. The same pattern was observed in Corfas and Makinodan’s mice.

One phenomenon not studied in the mice, but regularly found in people neglected as children, are problems with stress: mood disorders, anxiety, and general dysfunction in a body’s stress responses.

Controlled for gender and age, average white matter volumes in the brains of children who grew up in a Romanian orphanage (left), started in an orphange but were placed in foster care (center), or never lived in an orphanage at all (right). Image: Sheridan et al./PNAS

Those mechanisms have been studied in another animal, the rhesus monkey. While deprivation studies on non-human primates — and in particular chimpanzees — are controversial, the results from the monkey studies have been instructive.

Early-life isolation sets off a flood of hormones that permanently warp their responses to stress, leaving them anxious and prone to violent swings in mood.

Isolation is so damaging because humans, especially as infants, literally depend on social stimulation to shape their minds, said psychologist John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago.

“Human social processes were once thought to have been incidental to learning and cognition,” Cacioppo wrote in an e-mail. “However, we now think that the complexities and demands of social species have contributed to the evolution of the brain and nervous system and to various aspects of cognition.”

Corfas and Makinodan’s team linked specific genetic changes to the abnormalities in their mice, and hope they might someday inform the development of drugs that can help reverse isolation’s effects.

A more immediate implication of the research is social. As evidence of neglect’s severe, long-term consequences accumulates, it could shape the way people think not just of orphanages, but policy matters like maternity and paternity leave, or the work requirements of single parents on welfare.

“What this work certainly says is that the first years of life are crucially important for brain architecture,” Fox said. “Infants and young children have to grow up in an environment of social relationships, and experiencing those is critical for healthy cognitive, social and psychological development. As a society, we should be figuring out how to encourage all that to happen.”

Father-Infant Interactions Reduce Behavior Problems at One Year

Here is another study offering further evidence that fathers are very important in the well-being of children. The two-parent family should never be forced when it is unhealthy, but the evidence keeps piling up that kids do better in a home with two loving, attentive parents/care-givers. The outcome was better for boys than for girls in this study, which may suggest the importance of bonding with a same-sex parent/care-giver.

Child's behavior linked to father-infant interactions, study shows

Posted On: July 18, 2012

Children whose fathers are more positively engaged with them at age three months have fewer behavioural problems at age twelve months, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust. The study suggests that interventions aimed at improving parent-child interaction in the early post-natal period may be beneficial to the child's behaviour later on in life.

Behavioural disorders are the commonest psychological problem affecting children. They are associated with a wide range of problems in adolescence and adult life, including academic failure, delinquency, peer rejection and poor psychiatric and physical health. Research suggests that the roots of enduring behavioural problems often extend back into the preschool years.

Epidemiological studies have identified a number of risk factors for the onset and continuity of behavioural problems. Amongst these, parenting characteristics and patterns of parent-child interaction appear to be particularly important. However, studies of parental factors usually focus on the role of the mother.

In a study published today in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, researchers at the University of Oxford studied 192 families recruited from two maternity units in the UK to see whether there was a link between father-child interactions in the early postnatal period and the child's behaviour.

Dr Paul Ramchandani, a researcher and clinical psychiatrist, now based at the Academic Unit of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Medicine, Imperial College London, led the study, which assessed father-infant interactions in the family home when the child was aged 3 months and compared these against the child's behaviour at age 12 months.

The researchers found that key aspects of the father-infant interaction, measured very early in children's lives, were associated with an increased risk of behavioural problems in children at an early age. This is the first time that this apparent influence has been demonstrated for observed father-infant interaction and such early onset behaviour problems.

"We found that children whose fathers were more engaged in the interactions had better outcomes, with fewer subsequent behavioural problems. At the other end of the scale children tended to have greater behavioural problems when their fathers were more remote and lost in their own thoughts, or when their fathers interacted less with them," explains Dr Ramchandani. "This association tended to be stronger for boys than for girls, suggesting that perhaps boys are more susceptible to the influence of their father from a very early age.

"We don't yet know whether the fathers being more remote and disengaged are actually causing the behavioural problems in the children, but it does raise the possibility that these early interactions are important."

The researchers believe there are a number of possible explanations for the association. The lack of paternal engagement could reflect wider problems in family relationships, with fathers who are in a more troubled relationship with their partner finding it more challenging to engage with their infant. Alternatively, it may reflect a broader lack of supervision and potentially care, for the infant, resulting in an increase in behavioural disturbance. Another possibility is that the infant's behaviour represents its attempt to elicit a parental reaction in response to an earlier lack of parental engagement.

Dr Ramchandani adds: "Focusing on the infant's first few months is important as this is a crucial period for development and the infant is very susceptible to environmental influences, such as the quality of parental care and interaction.

"As every parent knows, raising a child is not an easy task. Our research adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that intervening early to help parents can make a positive impact on how their infant develops."

Source: Wellcome Trust

Prostate Cancer Starts with the Plastic Baby Bottle

Bisphenol A has been shown over and over again to be an endocrine disruptor, a chemical that messes with our gender hormones and leads to a variety of cancers. Yet most governments have refused to force manufacturers to remove the chemical from their products.

It has become a socio-economic issue because many companies are voluntarily creating products without biphenol A, but they tend to cost more, so those with limited income or little awareness of this issue are still using products with these toxic and deadly chemicals.

The newest study shows that male babies who drink from bottles containing this chemical are at higher risk of prostate cancer later in life. Certainly, this is just a correlation - there is no way to prove cause and effect over that span of time. But it adds to the already enormous body of evidence that this chemical is deadly.

My other posts on this topic can be found with the xenoestrogens label.

Here is a bit of the article from The Daily Mail Online (follow the link to read the whole article):

A gender-bending chemical found in babies' bottles may raise their odds of prostate cancer in later life, scientists have warned.

In experiments, newborn rats fed bisphenol A, a building-block of many commonly-used plastics, were more likely to develop pre-cancerous cells as they aged.

With chemical levels similar to those commonly found in the human body, the researchers said their findings are directly relevant to babies' health.

Their warning comes just a week after the European food watchdog said that the amounts of the chemical we are exposed to in day-to-day life are too low to do any harm.

The Food Standards Agency also said that bisphenol A does not carry a risk but the latest study raises fresh concerns about the compound which is also found in CD cases, tin can linings, sunglasses, plastic knives and forks, mobile phones and dental sealants.

The American researchers showed that giving newborn rats the chemical raised their odds of developing cellular damage that can lead to prostate cancer in later life. Both mouth drops and injections were equally damaging.

University of Illinois researcher Gail Prins said: 'There was no difference in the number of lesions, whether the bisphenol A was given by injection or orally, the prostate pathology was the same.

'It mattered nothing which way it was given.'

This is important, because it many previous studies which have focused on jabs have been criticised for not being true to life and their results downplayed.

The latest research suggests that the damage seen in such experiments also occurs when we access it through food and drink.

Bisphenol A has previously been linked to fertility problems, breast cancer, prostate cancer and heart attacks.

Tags: xenoestrogens, prostate cancer, men, infants, Bisphenol A, Gail Prins, Daily Mail, pre-cancerous cells