Traumatic and Adverse Childhood Experiences and Developmental Differences in Psychiatric Risk

While adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are known to impart significant risk for negative mental health and cognitive outcomes in youth, translation of ACE scores into clinical intervention is limited by poor specificity in predicting negative outcomes. This work expands on the ACE framework using a data-driven approach to identify 8 different forms of traumatic and adverse childhood experiences (TRACEs) and reveal their differential associations with psychiatric risk and cognition across development.

Building upon the traditional ACEs model, this study aimed to characterize unique components of commonly co-occurring TRACEs and to examine moderation of longitudinal change in mental health and cognitive development during adolescence.

This work draws from youth and their caregivers who completed up to 4 annual behavioral assessments from 2016 to 2021 as part of the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. Data collection was performed at 21 regionally-distributed sites across the United States. Analyses for this work were conducted January 2023 through November 2023.

Youth participants in the ABCD study's exposure to 268 different TRACEs, which were distilled into adversity components using nonlinear principal components analysis.

Mixed-effects and latent change score models considered TRACEs components as moderators of longitudinal change in internalizing and externalizing mental health problems, as well as longitudinal change in cognitive ability.

Data were distilled from 11 876 youth participants, who were grouped into dyads with a caregiver. ABCD study youth participants were 9 to 10 years old at baseline assessment (year 0) and 12 to 13 years old at ABCD year 3. A total of 5679 participants (47.8%) were female. Analyses revealed that TRACEs organized into 8 thematic adversity components (e.g., family conflict, interpersonal violence). At baseline assessment (year 0), exposure to nearly every adversity component was associated with poorer mental health and diminished cognitive ability. Yet across time, it was observed that different forms of adversity were variably linked to both increases and decreases in internalizing and externalizing problems. For example, while peer aggression (t = 5.31) and family conflict (t = 5.67) were associated with increases in both internalizing and externalizing problems over early adolescence, community threat (t = 2.82) and poverty (t = 2.07) were linked to decreased problems, potentially representing adaptive suppression of symptoms. Finally, adversity types related to resource deprivation (eg, poverty, caregiver maladjustment) were associated with declines in cognitive ability over early adolescence.

In this cohort study, distinct forms of TRACEs differentially moderated developmental changes in psychiatric risk and cognitive ability in different ways, offering the possibility for precision-based prediction of risk for youth. Such findings could be used in targeted early prevention and intervention strategies for at-risk youth.