A follow-up study by the same researchers suggests that these findings translate to humans. They performed postmortem examinations of the brains of child abuse victims who had committed suicide as adults, and compared them to the brains of suicide victims who had not been abused as children and to those who had died of other causes. They found that the hippocampi of suicide victims who were abused as children had significantly lower levels of glucocorticoid receptor messenger RNA than those of the other two groups.
