Table 2 Clinical data on ELA and cognitive impairment
From: Early life adversity as a risk factor for cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease
Type of study | Subjects | Stressors | Outcome measurement | Cognitive outcome | References |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Cohort study | 13 subjects with ELA, average age, 13(± 2.58) years of age; 21 healthy subjects, average age, 13 (± 1.96) years of age | Neglect, maltreatment, and unstable early environments | The change task (a variant of the stop-signal task) | Cognitive control ↓ | [67] |
Cohort Study | 93 male subjects experienced child separation; 186 male subjects without child separation | Parental separation | The Finnish Defense Forces Basic Intellectual Ability Test | At 20 years: verbal and arithmetic cognitive ability↓; at 70 years: verbal, visuospatial, arithmetic, and general cognitive ability↓ | [68] |
Cross-sectional study | 64 subjects with major depressive disorder and 65 non-depressed controls, 20 to 50 years of age | Assessed by the self-reported Early Life Stress Questionnaire | Composite neuropsychological measures | Working memory and processing speed↓ | [74] |
Longitudinal study | 9942 subjects | Low childhood socioeconomic status, lack of friends, childhood parental mental health problems, and poor parent-child relationships | Orientation and calculation, immediate memory, and delayed memory test | ↓ | [72] |
Longitudinal study | 5000 subjects | Domestic violence, physical cruelty, emotional cruelty, harsh parenting, and poly-victimization | The ‘triangles’ social cognition assessment (mean subject age: 13.75 years) and IQ assessment (mean subject age: 8 years) | General cognition↓ | [23] |
Cross-sectional study | 215 undergraduate students, average age = 19.1, 295 community subjects, average age = 36.24 | Assessed by the self-reported adverse childhood experiences scale | Wisconsin Card Sorting Test | Cognitive flexibility↓ | [75] |
Longitudinal study | 12,288 subjects, 18 to 42 years of age | Physical abuse and neglect | The Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test and Digit-Span Backward Task | Verbal memory and working memory↓ | [69] |
Longitudinal study | 11,475 subjects, average age, 45 years | Low childhood family socioeconomic status and poor childhood social relationships | Telephone interview of cognitive status, word recall, and figure drawing | ↓ | [73] |