Adversity in early life, such as poverty, sickness, or family strife, has long been associated with mental health issues and worse cognitive development as children age. But at this point, it is uncertain how these variables will interact and change over time.
The interaction between early-life hardship, mental health issues, and cognitive performance throughout childhood has now been uncovered by researchers at the University of Cambridge working with colleagues in Nigeria.
The findings, which were published today in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, reveal that childhood mental health determines how much early adversity affects later cognitive performance.
Scientists examined data from the continuing Millennium Cohort Study, which has tested 13,287 children at ages three, five, seven, eleven, and fourteen on a range of assessments.
They used measures of early-life adversity (defined as occurring before the age of three), mental health, and cognitive performance – specifically, working memory and vocabulary.
The team from the University of Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit used a statistical method to find out how much mental health affects the link between early-life adversity and cognitive performance later in life.
They found that adversity in early life is linked to lower scores on tests of working memory and vocabulary because it hurts mental health in childhood.
For example, bad mental health between the ages of 3 and 14 caused by problems in early life accounted for 59% of the difference in poorer working memory performance at age 11 and 70% of the difference in poorer vocabulary performance at age 14.
It was shown that early-life adversity predicted worse mental health from years 3 to 14, with the link being highest at age 3, but weakening with time.
In other words, kids who had a hard start in life were most likely to have mental health problems between the ages of 3 and 14, though their mental health was worse at age 3 than in later years.
This shows that experiencing hardship in early life at this developmental juncture has a detrimental long-term effect on mental health.
They also discovered that when mental health issues decreased over time, people’s working memory and vocabulary expanded along with it.
This shows that the negative effects of early-life adversity on later cognition might be reduced if behavioral and psychological issues can be resolved while children are still young.
This finding means a lot for doctors, teachers, and parents who are involved in interventions.
The findings of the study “suggest that early-life adversity can lead to prolonged periods of poor mental health, which in turn may have lasting effects on cognitive performance, such as working memory and vocabulary,” adds lead author Dr Tochukwu Nweze from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.
“We already know that poor mental health and cognition are associated with numerous behavioural problems which affect life quality and satisfaction. This reinforces the need for early interventions to give children the best possible life-outcomes.”
The researchers say that in a time when teens and young people are having more mental health problems, which are made worse by things like wars, pandemics, and climate change, educators and clinicians need to focus on building resilience in children who have been through hard times early in life.
Dr. Nweze believes this is one approach to help people overcome the “self-sustaining mental health difficulties” that they’ve been dealing with since childhood.
Source: 10.1111/jcpp.13757
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