Adults with court-documented histories of childhood maltreatment may only have small differences in biological aging compared with matched controls at about 60 years, although the differences were not statistically significant.
The prospective longitudinal cohort included 276 adult participants who provided saliva samples during follow-up in 2022 to 2023, including 164 with court-documented childhood maltreatment and 112 controls. Maltreatment was documented in court records from 1967 to 1971 and included neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. Controls were recruited from elementary school registers and birth hospitals and matched on demographic factors and childhood socioeconomic circumstances. The participants were about 60 years at follow-up.
Investigators assessed biological aging using two DNA methylation–based epigenetic clocks. GrimAge was used to quantify the cumulative burden of aging-related biological damage, while DunedinPACE measured the current rate of aging-related biological deterioration. Primary models adjusted for age, sex, and self-reported race and ethnicity. Additional analyses adjusted for smoking and body mass index (BMI) and used inverse-probability weighting to account for differential attrition.
The participants with documented childhood maltreatment had older GrimAge and faster DunedinPACE measurements compared with controls. However, both differences were small, and neither was statistically significant.
Adjustment for smoking attenuated the effect sizes to 0.05 for GrimAge and 0.08 for DunedinPACE. Adjustment for BMI resulted in effect sizes of 0.23 and 0.13, respectively. The results were unchanged when inverse-probability weighting was used to account for differential attrition.
The investigators noted that the effect sizes were consistent with previous studies that relied on retrospective reports of childhood maltreatment, suggesting that reporting bias was unlikely to explain previously observed associations. They also noted that the attenuation following adjustment for smoking and BMI suggested behavioral pathways may play a role in long-term differences in aging.
The findings did not indicate large differences in aging trajectories through age 60 associated with childhood maltreatment. The investigators cautioned against using epigenetic clocks clinically to assess the individual health risk associated with maltreatment, noting that the small effect sizes would require large samples for policy or intervention evaluations using these biomarkers.
The study had several limitations. The relatively small number of participants with biomarker data limited the ability to examine differences across demographic and life-history subgroups. GrimAge and DunedinPACE are imperfect measures of biological aging, and both were developed for analysis of blood but applied to saliva in this study. The investigators noted that the effect estimates may therefore represent a lower bound and called for similar studies using blood samples and for DNA methylation biomarkers optimized for saliva.
“Overall, findings support lasting but modest associations between childhood maltreatment and biological aging,” wrote lead study author Daniel W. Belsky, PhD, of the Department of Epidemiology as well as the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and colleagues.
Full disclosures of the study authors can be found in the study.
Source: JAMA Network Open
