Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
|
|
CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS  Alexandra Sullivan, PhD Source: Psychological Science journal Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened A new study published this month was the first to test whether psychotherapy that addresses trauma in very young children can potentially prevent serious disease later in life by slowing down the aging of the body’s cells [1]. This kind of extraordinary claim tends to generate media interest. It was reported by at least one local, one national media outlet, and highlighted by the National Institutes of Health program that funded the work. Who Did This? Alexandra Sullivan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Intergenerational Developmental Health Program at the University of California San Francisco. The director of the project was psychologist Nicole R. Bush, who has first- or co-authored over 200 papers. They are both trying to prove how stressful life experiences become biologically embedded in physiology and epigenetics and cause health problems. The Claim The outcome variable in this study used an epigenetic age clock, which is based on measuring the number of methyl groups attached to DNA strands. Methylation occurs at cytosine-guanine pairs, called CpG sites. Certain regions, which tend to regulate DNA expression, are unmethylated. It is believed that methylation at these sites can function like an off switch to stop DNA expression. Most vertebrate DNA regions, however, are not regulation sites, and they are methylated in the natural state. Researchers realized that methyl groups are lost and added to DNA over time due to wear and tear. Steve Horvath figured out that this happened systematically with age, and, in 2013, developed the first epigenetic age clock based on 353 CpG sites (193 increase with age, 160 decrease with age) [2]. When the clock calculates a person’s epigenetic age older than their chronological age, this is called “age acceleration,” allowing researchers to speculate that premature aging may have been caused by stressful experiences, which has downhill effects of illness or early death. In the current study, Sullivan and colleagues used an epigenetic clock designed for children based on 94 CpGs. Participants were mother-child dyads exposed to trauma or grief recruited from a clinic. Children were 3-6-years old. Two cheek swabs were taken from 45 children at the baseline start of therapy and again ten months later. A comparison group of 110 children of similar age was drawn from a different study that did not involve treatment. The two groups did not differ on age acceleration at baseline. The groups differed at the second time point, as the comparison group showed some age acceleration while the treated group showed significantly less age acceleration. The authors concluded, “Findings provide robust, quasi-experimental support that dyadic intervention is associated with trauma-related accelerated aging biomarkers, most likely in a direction beneficial for health and development.” Analysis This was the first study of this type in children. One similar prior study, in adult combat veterans, did not show a slowing down of age acceleration after receiving treatment [3]. There are multiple concerns about methylation studies as an index of bodily damage. While more than a dozen studies, mostly in adults, have shown that epigenetic age acceleration consistently predicts PTSD status, all were cross-sectional and have zero power to prove causation. In addition, age acceleration has been found (inconsistently) with anxiety, autism, depression, schizophrenia and other conditions, suggesting it’s a non-specific index of vulnerability, like baseline heart rate variability, and is not unique to stress or trauma. Another concern is that researchers don’t know if “age acceleration” in PTSD is maladaptive, or, being a misnomer, is an adaptive response. Epigenetics changes were not linked to any functional significance in this study. An alternative theory is that methylation changes are simply the residue of a complex system and interaction of many parts, and may have little to no functional consequence. Why Did This Happen? The authors’ conclusion is consistent with many trauma researchers who believe societal impacts and life experiences determine most of one’s lack of success in life. Rather than being the Holy Grail that will finally find scientific proof for a belief system, epigenetics appears destined to go the way of brain imaging. While most researchers still fervently claim that trauma damages brains, pre-trauma prospective studies show that brain differences pre-exist trauma exposure [4]. Epigenetic differences are likely to pre-exist life experiences, too [5], and any shifts during psychotherapy may be noise. REFERENCES [1] Sullivan, A. D. W., Merrill, S. M., Konwar, C., Coccia, M., Rivera, L., MacIsaac, J. L., Lieberman, A. F., Kobor, M. S., & Bush, N. R. (2024). Intervening After Trauma: Child–Parent Psychotherapy Treatment Is Associated With Lower Pediatric Epigenetic Age Acceleration. Psychological Science, 35(9), 1062-1073. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241260247 [2] Horvath S. (2013). DNA methylation age of human tissues and cell types. Genome Biology 14(10):R115. doi: 10.1186/gb-2013-14-10-r115. [3] Katrinli, S., King, A.P., Duval, E.R. et al.(2023). DNA methylation GrimAge acceleration in US military veterans with PTSD. Neuropsychopharmacol. 48, 773–780. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-023-01537-z [4] Julia A. DiGangi et al. (2013). Pretrauma risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review of the literature. Clinical Psychology Review 33:728-744. Andrea Danese et al. (2017). The origins of cognitive deficits in victimized children: Implications for neuroscientists and clinicians. American Journal of Psychiatry 174 (2017): 349-361. Michael S. Scheeringa (2020). Reexamination of diathesis stress and neurotoxic stress theories: A qualitative review of pre-trauma neurobiology in relation to posttraumatic stress symptoms. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research (2020). [5] Zannas AS, Linnstaedt SD, An X, et al. (2023). Epigenetic aging and PTSD outcomes in the immediate aftermath of trauma. Psychological Medicine 53(15):7170-7179. doi:10.1017/S0033291723000636 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. Comments are closed.
|