The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

by Nadine Burke Harris

Further work by researchers Aoife O’Donovan and Thomas Neylan compared the telomeres of people with PTSD with the telomeres of people in good mental health. What they found was that overall, those with PTSD had shorter telomeres than those in the control group. However, what was really interesting was that the people with PTSD who did not have early childhood adversity didn’t tend to have shorter telomeres.