Childhood emotional trauma linked to heightened MS risk among women

Childhood trauma may be linked to a heightened risk of multiple sclerosis (MS) in later life among women, according to new research.

The associations were strongest for sexual abuse and for experience of several categories of abuse, according to findings published by the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, part of the BMJ group.

The researchers drew on participants in the nationally representative Norwegian Mother, Father, and Child cohort study, with nearly 78,000 pregnant women joining the study between 1999 and 2008. Their health was monitored until the end of 2018. 

14,477 women said they had experienced childhood abuse while 63,520 said they hadn’t. The women with a history of abuse were more likely to be current or former smokers – a known risk factor for MS – to be overweight, and to have depressive symptoms.

Some 300 women were diagnosed with MS during the monitoring period, nearly a quarter of whom said they had been abused as children, compared with just under one in five of those who didn’t develop MS. 

After accounting for potentially influential factors including smoking, obesity, educational attainment, and household income, women who had been abused as children were more likely to be diagnosed with MS.

The observed association was strongest for sexual abuse (65 percent heightened risk), followed by emotional abuse (40 percent heightened risk) and physical abuse (31 percent heightened risk).

The risk was further increased for exposure to two categories of abuse (66 percent heightened risk), rising to 93 percent for exposure to all three categories.

Similar results were obtained after the researchers excluded women who might have been in the early phase of MS when obvious symptoms had yet to appear.

The association persisted when women who had already been diagnosed with MS at the start of the study were included.

The study is not able to establish cause, and environmental factors such as diet, nutrition, physical activity levels, and parental smoking were not accounted for, which the researchers acknowledge might be independently important.

They also lacked information on how long the abuse lasted, the age at which it started, or what levels of emotional support those abused could draw on.

The researchers say there may be plausible biological explanations for the associations found. Childhood abuse can disrupt brain and glandular signalling – the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis – prompting a proinflammatory state, they say.

Photo by Nani Chavez