At Risk Youth

Childhood trauma may cause some adults gain weight and have difficulty losing it, according to a new study of more than 17,000 patients in the Kaiser Permanente health system.

In 1987 Dr. Vincent Felitti studied 286 obese people in the Kaiser system and found that 50% had been sexually abused as children, a much higher rate than average. He decided to look into other kinds of childhood trauma that may be linked to overweight, and began to investigate previous studies.

• One study of more than 11,000 women found that those who had been abused as children were 27 percent more likely to be overweight.
• A study of 15,000 teenagers found that sexual childhood abuse in males raised their risk of obesity as adults to 66 percent.
• Dr. Felitti then began the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) study involving a database of over 17,000 Kaiser patients.

Dr. Felitti and his colleagues defined adverse experience as ongoing childhood neglect, living with one or no biological parent, having a mentally ill or drug addicted parent, having a parent in jail, witnessing domestic violence, and sexual, physical or emotional abuse. Children who had four or more of these experiences had double the risk of obesity, double the risk of heart attack and stroke, and four times the risk for emphysema.

Dr. Felitti and others believe that food is a comforting escape for abused children.

“Being fat is not the problem,” he said. “It’s the solution.”

What’s more troubling about the study is that some researchers believe that adverse experiences in childhood can lead to permanent biological changes in certain areas of the body, and that such changes are passed down from one generation to the next.

A controversial new study from Washington University in St. Louis concluded that children as young as three years old can experience depression.

• Researchers led by Dr. Joan Luby, a psychiatrist, followed more than 200 children ages three to six for two years.
• The children took four mental health examinations during the course of the study.
• Nearly 20 percent of the study subjects had persistent depression on all four examinations.

Dr. Luby said that depressed children appeared sad even during play times. Their games had themes of death or other sober topics, and they suffered from lack of appetite, sleep problems, and temper tantrums. Some felt overly guilty about small things, such as spilling a glass of water.

Children whose mothers were depressed or who suffered from mood disorders, and children who had experienced trauma, such as the death of a parent, were more likely to be depressed.

Adolescent depression has been linked to a number of troubling statistics, including increased rates of substance abuse, defiance, anxiety, suicidal ideation and poor academic performance.

This study appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry.