Chronic Illness Trauma Studies
How Adversity Shapes Health & Why It's Not In Your Head
Discover the research showing how adverse life events affect risk for all kinds of chronic illnesses. Start with the introduction for an overview and a list of over 30 diseases affected by trauma in pregnancy, birth and childhood.
Antibodies have been particularly helpful biomarkers for studying the effects of events that can begin a decade or more before onset.
I consequently use studies in type 1 diabetes, the autoimmune form of diabetes, as a frequent example because the research has been extensive, starting very early in life.
Read the series knowing that the research findings are similar for every other chronic illness I have looked at so far, from other autoimmune diseases to chronic fatigue to asthma and many more.
This series of blog posts presents the science linking chronic illness and trauma. It introduces research that made me think differently about disease from what I learned as a doctor. It may that help you think differently too, as well as understand why events that trigger the onset of disease are ...
In this 6th post of my discovery series, I review 25 years of studies examining links between stress, trauma and adverse events, and type 1 diabetes (T1D). The findings support the long-held suspicion that serious life events increase risk for type 1 diabetes. Whether you have T1D or a different ...
Despite observed links between stress, trauma and type 1 diabetes (T1D) for over 2000 years, most doctors don't know about the research. Despite 40 years of more specific, recent research showing that serious life events and trauma increase risk for T1D, the idea is still dismissed. This means ...
The research presented in the past 3 posts taught me that adversity, trauma and stress during pregnancy as well as during birth and infancy increase risk for chronic illness such as type 1 diabetes and asthma. And that my mother and I had experienced similarly stressful events. This post ...
Can stressful or traumatic events cause chronic disease? Today's post introduces studies linking stress, trauma and epigenetics in early life including during pregnancy, labor and birth. The research offers insights into how and why life experiences affect long-term health. It's not ...
This second post of my chronic illness and trauma series builds on early risk factors for autoimmune disease such as type 1 diabetes that I introduced in post #1. It focuses on similar links between adverse babyhood experiences and asthma. Here you'll see how a child's chronic illness - asthma in ...
This series describes research confirming links between trauma and autoimmune disease that also apply to other chronic illnesses such as type 2 diabetes, asthma, obesity, heart disease and other characteristics of insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome, and more. This post identifies risk ...
