Memory and emotional regulation. Chronic cortisol shrinks it — and Stanford imaging found it kept shrinking for 12 to 18 months after the trauma had stopped.
The threat detector becomes hyper-responsive. It fires danger signals in safe rooms, for the rest of a life.
Judgment, impulse control, planning. Suppressed — which is why what looks like a choice often is not one.
Harvard's review of the neuroimaging literature concluded that childhood maltreatment is the most important preventable cause of psychopathology, accounting for roughly 45% of the population attributable risk for childhood-onset psychiatric disorders.
Teicher M, Samson J. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2016.
Twenty years after the danger has passed, the body is still responding to it.
The Dunedin study followed 1,000 people for thirty years. Twenty years after childhood maltreatment, participants still showed elevated levels of four separate inflammatory markers.
Chronic cortisol degrades mitochondria — the cell's power supply. Energy starvation, cell death, and regional brain atrophy follow.
Because the adversity in Dunedin was documented as it happened rather than recalled later, it is among the strongest evidence in the field.
"This is the pathway by which something that happened at five ends a life at fifty-five."
Danese A et al., Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 2009. · Palmer C, Brain Energy, 2022, and the primary literature cited therein.