A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has shown that chronic stress of poverty, neglect and physical abuse in early life may shrink the parts of a child’s developing brain responsible for memory, learning and processing emotion.
While early-life stress already has been linked to depression, anxiety, heart disease, cancer and a lack of educational and employment success, researchers have long been seeking to understand what part of the brain is affected by stress to help guide interventions.
The UW research recently published in the journal Biological Psychiatry adds to a growing body of research linking chronic stress early in life to brain development. The research focused on two brain regions — the hippocampus and amygdala — that are involved in memory, learning and processing emotion.
Researchers show how early stress hurts brain development
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