Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit, Center for Genomic Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Lancet Psychiatry. 2022 Dec;9(12):978-991. doi: 10.1016/S2215-0366(22)00362-5.
Variation in the mental health of people who have experienced childhood maltreatment is substantial. One hypothesis is that this variation is attributable, in part, to the timing of maltreatment-specifically, whether maltreatment occurs during sensitive periods in development when the brain is maximally sensitive to particular types of environmental input. To determine whether there is scientific consensus around when periods of peak sensitivity occur, we did a systematic review of human observational studies. Although 89 (75%) of the 118 unique cross-sectional or longitudinal cohort studies we identified reported timing effects, no consistent sensitive periods were identified for any of the most studied outcomes. Thus, observational research on childhood maltreatment has yet to converge on a single period (or set of periods) of increased vulnerability. We identified study characteristics that might contribute to these between-study differences and used observations from our Review to suggest a comprehensive set of recommendations for future research.
经历过童年期虐待的人，其心理健康状况存在很大差异。有一种假说认为，这种差异部分归因于虐待发生的时间——具体而言，是虐待发生在大脑对特定类型环境输入最为敏感的发育敏感时期。为了确定有关高峰期发生时间是否存在科学共识，我们对人类观察性研究进行了系统回顾。尽管我们确定的 118 项独特的横断面或纵向队列研究中有 89 项（75%）报告了时间效应，但对于大多数研究的结果，都没有确定一致的敏感时期。因此，关于儿童期虐待的观察性研究尚未集中在一个易受伤害的单一时期（或一组时期）。我们确定了可能导致这些研究间差异的研究特征，并利用我们的综述中的观察结果，为未来研究提出了一整套建议。
