Children Mistreated before Age 5 May Experience Greater Depression

While depression can be debilitating in children, the impact of that depression can be affected by experiences of abuse on the child before the age of five. According to a Science Daily post, is a child is abused very early, it can be especially damaging.

This finding is from a new study of low-income children conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota and the University of Rochester, Mt. Hope Family Center and appears in the January/February 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.

The study identified that those children who experience maltreatment grow up with a significant amount of stress. The stress hormone – cortisol – helps the body to regulate stress. When stress overloads the system, cortisol can soar to high levels or plummets to very low levels, which can harm development and health.

In studying 500 low-income children between ages 7 to 13, roughly half of whom had been abused and/or neglected, it was determined that high levels of depression were more frequent among children who were abused in the first five years of their lives.

Interestingly, only those children who were abused before the age of 5 and depressed had an atypical flattening of cortisol production during the day. Other children – depressed or not – showed an expected daily decline in cortisol from morning to afternoon.

“In the United States, more than 1.5 million children are abused and neglected every year, though it’s estimated that the actual rates are substantially greater,” according to Dante Cicchetti, McKnight Presidential Chair and professor of child development and psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, who led the study.

“The results of this study have significant implications for children in the child welfare population and underscore the importance of providing early preventive interventions to children who have been abused.”