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posted by janrinok on Thursday January 09 2020, @08:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the child-is-the-parent-of-the-adult dept.

The Guardian is reporting that the effects of child privation are lifelong.

Children who experience severe deprivation early in life have smaller brains in adulthood, researchers have found.

The findings are based on scans of young adults who were adopted as children into UK families from Romania's orphanages that rose under the regime of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.

Now experts say that despite the children having been adopted into loving, nurturing families in the early 1990s, the early neglect appears to have left its mark on their brain structures.

"I think the most striking finding is ... that the effects on the brain have persisted," said Prof Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a co-author of the study from King's College London, who added that the results showed neuroplasticity had limits.

"The idea that everything is recoverable, no matter what your experience ... isn't necessarily true – even with the best care you can still see those signs of that earlier adversity," he said.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sonuga-Barke and colleagues told how they carried out brain scans and other measures of 67 Romanian adoptees who had spent between three and 41 months living in severe deprivation as children. At the time of the scans the adoptees were between 23 and 28 years old.

The team also took brain scans from 21 adults of a similar age who had been born and adopted in the UK before they were six months old.

The results revealed the Romanian adoptees had on average an 8.6% smaller brain overall than their UK peers. The team also found the size of the reduction was linked to the length of time spent in the Romanian orphanages: each additional month was linked to a 3cm3 lower total brain volume. "The more deprivation they had, the smaller their brains are," said Sonuga-Barke.

The team's analysis showed the smaller brain size explained the reduced IQ and, at least in part, the higher rates of ADHD found among the Romanian adoptees.

Among further findings, the team discovered that two areas of the brain showed a further size difference compared with the UK-born adoptees – although these did not vary with time spent in the orphanages.

While the study warns that the deprivation was extreme in the orphanages and that the results might not be directly extended to milder deprivation, it is a cautionary tale about the potential long term costs, both economic and human, in not providing both mothers and children with proper support in their early years.


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @03:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 09 2020, @03:16PM (#941436)

    Oh I forgot in 1. poverty and privation are largely inherited. It varies - in some places there's food banks, in some places inheritance taxes are high, in some cases infants are put for adoption - but the correlation between a child's financial situation and their early-year caregivers' financial situation is extraordinarily high.

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:04PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday January 09 2020, @04:04PM (#941468) Journal

    While it is true that poverty and privation are largely inherited, it is also irrelevant in this context, as the poverty or non-poverty of the children was not under consideration anyway.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.