A new study by Duke University shows how abused children age faster than those who are not. This doesn’t mean abused children grow up faster, this study means that aging is occurring, physically and more rapidly, at a cellular level in abused children.  Although childhood stress has long been linked with later disease risk and health problems, the study is the first to show accelerated biological aging in childhood as a result of stress. 

“Those kids are ‘older’ than they are supposed to be,” said study leader Idan Shalev, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University. If the cellular aging isn’t reversed, Shalev told LiveScience, the children would likely be at risk for premature death.

Research of this kind, while very important, must only be telling us what we already know and believe true, and that is, abuse causes much deeper and more long term problems, which last long past the healing of bruises and broken bones.  Research of this kind, a precise understanding of what abuse can literally ’cause’ a child to become is critical knowledge for developing better treatments and processes’ for healing.

The Stop Abuse Campaign is dedicated to stopping all abuse. Get involved today. Make a difference. Become an AbuseStopper by taking The Pledge on our homepage. More important, become a member of the Stop Abuse Campaign.  It’s quick, easy and it’s the right thing to do.  Support the only organization in America with a mission and plan to stop ALL of abuse.  Get involved and learn how.  Make an effort to make a difference, because sooner or later, abuse touches us all.

Bullying, child abuse hasten aging in kids

by Stephanie Pappas Published April 26, 2012 LiveScience

Children exposed to multiple instances of violence age faster on a cellular level than children without violent experiences, a new study finds.

Although childhood stress has long been linked with later disease risk and health problems, the study is the first to show accelerated biological aging in childhood as a result of stress.

“Those kids are ‘older’ than they are supposed to be,” said study leader Idan Shalev, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University. If the cellular aging isn’t reversed, Shalev told LiveScience, the children would likely be at risk for premature death.

Violence and stress

To gauge biological aging, Shalev and his colleagues examined a portion of DNA called telomeres. These sequences cap the ends of our chromosomes (packets of DNA), but they get shorter with every cell division, acting as a sort of molecular “clock”that signals wear-and-tear on DNA.Several studies have found that adults who experienced violence as children tend to have shorter telomeres than those with peaceful childhoods. But those studies couldn’t determine whether the telomeres had been shortened because of childhood stress or because of later adult health problems stemming from that stress, Shalev said.

To find out which was the case, he and his colleagues began a study that looked not backward, but ahead. Using a sample of 236 children from a British sample born between 1994 and 1995, the researchers took DNA samples by swabbing the children’s cheeks and then measured the length of each child’s telomeres at age 5 and age 10.

By the 10-year-old time point, 17 percent of the children had experienced domestic violence in their households, 24.2 percent had been frequently bullied and 26.7 percent had been physically abused by an adult, according to interviews with the children’s mothers. (Some kids were already in protective custody as a result of this abuse.) Because some children experienced more than one type of violence, the researchers split them into groups: kids who hadn’t experienced violence (54.2 percent), kids who had experienced one type of violence (29.2 percent), and kids who had experienced two or more types of violence (16.5 percent).
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/04/26/bullying-child-abuse-hasten-aging-in-kids/#ixzz1tNcXMwU

Also Read: http://stopabusecampaign.com/feature/child-abuse-changes-the-brain