Having had a chronic illness for 20 years, it has sometimes felt like I've had a volcano inside of me - out of my control, traumatic, and life-altering.But research explaining links between chronic illness, trauma and the nervous system has made sense of my illness. It has also helped me ...
ABEs (Adverse Babyhood Experiences)
#4 Stress During Pregnancy, Birth and Infancy Increases Risk for Chronic Illness (Type 1 Diabetes, Asthma, ME/CFS)
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 ...
Adverse Babyhood Experiences and Rheumatoid Disease / Arthritis (ABEs & RA)
In her memoir "Sonata" about living with rheumatoid arthritis, piano virtuoso Andrea Avery wonders whether being born cesarean or not being breastfed affected her risk of getting a debilitating, life-altering disease. Readers on Kelly Young's Rheumatoid Arthritis Warrior blog also share ...
#3 Adverse Babyhood Experiences (ABEs) Influence Epigenetics and Risk for Chronic Illness
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 ...
#2 Adverse Babyhood Experiences and Asthma: Separation in Early Life is a Risk Factor for Chronic Illness
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 ...
#1 Adverse Babyhood Experiences Increase Risk for Autoimmune Disease (Type 1 Diabetes, RA, SLE, MS, …)
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 ...
Trauma and Chronic Illness: 19 Characteristics that Can Make Sense of Symptoms (Summary of the Science)
There are a lot of unanswered questions about chronic illness. Why do so many of us develop our diseases after periods of stress, for example? Why are we then unable to recover by addressing, removing or reducing the stress in our lives? Why do some people with type 1 diabetes, or chronic ...