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Poster #19 - Cumulative Adversity Predicts Toddler Hair Cortisol through Mother’s Hair Cortisol

Sat, March 23, 12:45 to 2:00pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Introduction: Cumulative early experiences with adversity are known to have long-term consequences on a young child (Shonkoff, 2010). Through sources including the environment of relationships, the built environment, and nutrition; cumulative adversity is thought to affect child development via biological chronic stress embedding during the sensitive period of early childhood development. Often measured by acute changes via salivary cortisol, chronic stress may be better reflected through hair cortisol concentration (HCC). As hair grows approximately 1cm each month, HCC reflects the average monthly cortisol output for each centimeter of hair length sampled. Very high or very low levels of HCC reflect physiologic chronic stress, with very low levels indicating blunted stress reactivity. Although much research has examined the relationship between adversity and hair cortisol in adults, research in early childhood is lacking. This study builds on the science by examining: a) the relationship between early adversity and toddler chronic stress (via HCC) and b) if this relationship is indirectly linked through mother’s chronic stress (via HCC). We hypothesize that early adversity will result in abnormal child HCC (either high or low) indirectly through the mother’s own level of HCC.
Methods: Low-income mothers from a Midwestern metropolis who were participating in a longitudinal birth cohort study were approached for consent to sample a shoelace-tip diameter of hair with rounded thinning shears from the mother’s and toddler’s posterior vertex for HCC analysis (n=142). Four cm of hair proximal to the scalp was ground, processed and then analyzed via immunoassay using Salimetrics® cortisol assay kit. HCC was calculated in pg/mg and ln-transformed for normalization. Adversity was calculated by summing known dichotomous thresholds of the built environment (poverty, chaos), the environment of relationships (mother-reported education, parenting stress, depression, parent relationship status married or living together, caregiving and developmentally enriching environment for a toddler), and nutrition (food security). Analyses were conducted with SPSS version 25 and PROCESS (Hayes, 2013).
Results and Conclusion: N = 94 mothers consented to hair sampling for their toddler and 92 mothers consented to providing hair for themselves. Mother-child (dyad) HCC values were excluded if the mother did not provide hair (n = 2) or if the HCC was an extreme outlier in the whole dyad (n = 9), the mother (n = 8), or toddler (n = 14); n = 61 dyads remained. Of the excluded dyads with outliers, 32% reported corticosteroid use, which can alter cortisol levels. See Table 1 for participants’ demographics. Results showed that cumulative adversity did not directly predict toddler HCC, rather this relationship was significantly indirect through maternal HCC. Specifically, cumulative adversity predicted a marginally significant lower maternal HCC, which in turn predicted a higher toddler HCC (Figure 1). As such, cumulative adversity is associated with a blunted stress response, or “biological burn out”, in the mother, which is then associated with increasing levels of biologic chronic stress in the child. This is one of the first studies that demonstrates how early adversity and maternal chronic stress affects the chronic stress in toddlers, measured via HCC.

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