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they fundamentally do t...
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ACEs create long-term problems is the ventral tegmental area (VTA). This is the pleasure and reward center of the brain and it plays ...
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The amygdala is the brain’s fear center.
When the amygdala is repeatedly triggered by chronic stressors, it becomes overactive,
what’s not. The amygdala begins sending false alarms to the other parts of your brain about things that shouldn’t actually be scary, just like the little boy who cried wolf.
This part of the brain is the driving force behind aggressive behavior
It works closely with the prefrontal cortex, which is why we see overlap in how they both regulate impulse control.
dysregulated locus coeruleus releases too much noradrenaline (the brain’s version of adrenaline) and can result in increased anxiety, arousal, and aggression. It can also seriously mess with your sleep-wake cycles by overload...
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Unlike the amygdala, which is thought to be a very primitive structure, the PFC is believed to be one of the last to have evolved, and it confers faculties of reason, judgment, planning, and decision-making.
“executive functioning,”
consequences of current a...
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When the amygdala gets activated during a major stress event, it sends signals to the hippocampus that disrupt its ability to knit together neurons, essentially making it more difficult for
the brain to create both short-term and long-term memories.
it’s easy to see how kids with quick-trigger amygdalae are behind the eight ball when it comes to everything from memorizing multiplication tables to spatial memory.
Responsible for things like rewards, motivation, and addiction, this part of your brain is the one you really don’t want running away with your credit card. Basically it all boils down to dopamine, which is the feel-good (or feel-amazing) neurotransmitter that peppers your brain with rewards when you have sex, shoot heroin, or say yes to that piece of triple chocolate cake at the end of the day.
When your body’s stress-response system is overloaded again and again, it messes with the sensitivity of your dopamine receptors.
The biological changes in the VTA that lead people to crave dopamine stimulators like high-sugar, high-fat foods also lea...
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The ACE Study shows that there is a dose-response relationship between ACE exposure and engaging in many activities and substances that activate the VTA. A person with four or more ACEs is two and a half times as likely to smoke, five and a half times as likely to be dependent on alcohol,...
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But cortisol isn’t the only bad guy here; the hormones leptin and ghrelin are also increased with activation of the stress response. Together they intensify appetite and work with cortisol to do their worst for your waistline.
The immune system wields a lot of power; it is responsible for monitoring the relationships between what’s inside and what’s outside in the world and also for defending the body against foreign threats.
Like everything else in the body, what’s important in the immune system is balance.
Dysregulation of the stress response has a profound impact on immune and inflammatory responses because virtually all the components of the immune system are influenced by stress hormones.
can suppress the immune system in some ways and activate it in others, and unfortunately none of it’s good. Stress can lead to deficiency in the part of the immune system that fights off...
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Research findings show a strong correlation between childhood stress and autoimmune disease in both children and adults.
a person with an ACE score of two or more had twice the odds of hospitalization for autoimmune disease as someone with zero ACEs.
sometimes the troops will attack the right enemies, but sometimes they’ll find trouble where trouble doesn’t exist.
leading to autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and multiple sclerosis. Because early adversity increases inflammation, when you have higher numbers of troops roaming around the body, there is a greater likelihood that they’ll make a mistake.
researchers discovered that even twenty years after their subjects had been maltreated as children, four different markers of inflammation were higher than they were in those who hadn’t been maltreated.
adverse childhood events had been reported as they were happening, strengthening the case for causality by documenting that the adversity preceded the biological harms.
When we realize that adversity in childhood harms the development and regulation of the immune system throughout someone’s life, we begin to understand just how powerful the ACE science can be to combat some of the leading causes of disease and death.
The consequences of toxic stress are not just neurologic and hormonal; they are also immunologic, and those symptoms are much more difficult to spot. Patty’s childhood adversity threatened her immune system as much as it did her mental well-being.
No one knew where to look.
an overactive stress response could do a lot of harm to someone’s health.
It looked to me like a clear case of postpartum depression, but no amount of urging could convince Charlene to get help.
social worker and trying hard to engage Charlene in treatment, but eventually we had to send Nia for yet another hospital stay.
it was time to start talking about Child Protective Services (CPS).
file a CPS report.
She was in the danger zone and it was clear by then that the dynamic between daughter and mom was affecting Nia’s growth.
But if an infant doesn’t have a caregiver’s reciprocal eye contact, stimulating facial expressions, snuggles, and kisses, hormonal and neurologic damage can occur, and that can prevent a child from growing and developing normally.
even if she has enough nutrition.
evidence of multigenerational ACEs.
first ten days of life predicted changes to their stress response that lasted for the entire lifetime. Even more startling, the changes continued into the next generation,
In fact, we now know that both environment and genetic code shape both biology and behavior.
we are finally able to see that there is a vital synchronicity that determines what we look like, how our bodies work, and ultimately who we are.
it turns out that the body doesn’t actually “read” every “word” of its DNA.
What scientists have discovered is that baked into the cells are both the genome (your entire genetic code) and the epigenome, another layer of chemical markers that sit on top of your DNA and determine which genes get read and transcribed into proteins and which ones don’t. The term epigenetic actually means “above the genome.” These epigenetic markers are handed down from parent to child along with the DNA.
These epigenetic notations are subject to experience, to being rewritten by your environment.
Activation of the stress response is one big way the environment can change epigenetic notations.
They placed pups of high-licker moms with moms who were low lickers, and vice versa. The study found that the pups’ DNA methylation took on the pattern of their foster moms’, not their genetic moms’.
Meany and his team found that the differences in licking and grooming that happened very early on (in this case, the first ten days of a rat pup’s life) made a huge difference.
