Childhood stress : A lifetime legacy

The idea that events occurring in the early years ofa person's life can influence their subsequent experience of morbidity and mortality occurs with increasing frequency in the literature concerning both living and past populations. In this paper we review the evidence for this association from studies of living and past populations. In living populations, follow up studies which examine the incidence of morbidity and mortality in groups of adults whose early life parameters are known provide the most reliable means of investigating this association, but such studies are restricted to those populations with comprehensive documentation of the events surrounding birth. The skeletal remains of past populations require a fundamentally different approach to the investigation of the long-term consequences of events in early life. Each skeletal series represents a set of retrospective records of childhood exposure to stress events together with indisputable evidence of the final outcome. However, in most cases the stress indicators are non-specific, the cause of death cannot be reliably determined, biological parameters such as age at death must be estimated, and non-biological parameters such as variation in socio-economic status are likely to remain obscure. Despite these problems we aim to show that the study of past populations can make a valuable contribution to understanding the association between exposure to stress during prenatal life and early childhood and adult health and longevity.