Child abuse suicide link

Child abuse can leave a person vulnerable to mental illness and trigger suicide, a new study has found.The discovery was made after scientists looked at the brains of 12 suicide victims who had been victims of abuse as children and found activity in a genetically-controlled mechanism for coping with stress was stunted.

The gene in question produced smaller amounts of its protein, increasing hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity and leading to greater risk of suicide.The same defect was not found in the brains of people who had died from causes other than suicide and had not suffered childhood abuse. The same was true of suicide victims without a history of abuse."It's almost as if there is an imprint left," said Michael Meaney at Canada’s McGill University in Montreal. "It's tragic," he told Can West News Service. “This would have hampered the men's ability to cope with stress and could have contributed to their suicides.

The new study, out on Sunday in the journal, Nature Neuroscience, is seen as the most convincing evidence yet that childhood abuse permanently scars genes.“The new findings point to how insidious the impact can be. They also provide clues for better understanding the impacts and devising treatments to reverse the damage,” said Meaney. But Professor Michael Meaney said they believe these biochemical effects could also occur later in life. "If you're a public health individual or a child psychologist you could say this shows you nothing you didn't already know. "But until you show the biological process, many people in government and policy-makers are reluctant to believe it's real."

Previous research has shown that abuse in childhood is associated with an increased reaction to stressful circumstances. But exactly how environmental factors interact with genes and contribute to depression or other mental disorders in adulthood is not well understood. The researchers are now trying to find out if other genes and behaviours are affected by abuse. "Individuals who are abused are also more likely to develop obesity," says Meaney, who wonders if that too may be linked to genes being turned on or off in response to early trauma or abuse.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children