Source+Ten

Teicher, Martin H. "Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science." //Wounds That Time Won't Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse // 2.4 (2000): n. pag. //Dana Press //. The Dana Foundation, 2000. Web. 15 Aug. 2012. .

1. E arly maltreatment, even exclusively psychological abuse, has enduring negative effects on brain development.

2. In separate surveys in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Canada, and of college students in New England and Texas, the percentage of women reporting sexual abuse during childhood ranged from 19 to 45.

3. The victim’s anger, shame, and despair can be directed inward to spawn symptoms such as depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and post-traumatic stress, or directed outward as aggression, impulsiveness, delinquency, hyperactivity, and substance abuse.

4. [In the case of dissociative identity disorder] Often there is a passive, depressed primary identity who cannot remember personal history as fully as can the other more hostile, protective, or controlling identities.

5. As we expected, abuse before age 18, when the brain is still rapidly developing, had a greater impact on limbic irritability than later abuse.

6. Patients physically or sexually abused after age 18 had scores not signiﬁcantly different from nonabused patients.

7. Patients with both physical and sexual abuse, however, were strongly affected regardless of when the abuse occurred, and those ﬁrst abused after age 18 were almost as affected as those ﬁrst abused earlier.

8. We found clinically signiﬁcant brain-wave abnormalities in 54 percent of patients with a history of early trauma but in only 27 percent of nonabused patients.

9. In patients with physical, sexual, or psychogical abuse, left-sided deﬁcits were more than six times as prevalent as right.

10. In patients with a history of psychological abuse, left-hemisphere deﬁcits were eight times as prevalent as right-sided deﬁcits.

11. The abused patients, however, were notably more developed in the right than the left cortex, even though all were right-handed.

12. Furthermore, in boys, neglect exerted a far greater effect than any other type of maltreatment; physical and sexual abuse exerted relatively minimal effects.

13. In girls, however, sexual abuse was a more powerful factor, associated with a major reduction in size of the middle portions of the corpus collosum.

14. New research suggests that abnormalities in the cerebellar vermis may be involved in psychiatric disorders including depression, manic-depressive illness, schizophrenia, autism, and attention deﬁcit/ hyperactivity disorder.

15. Finally, diminished maternal attention also appears to be associated with a lifelong decrease in production of the hormone oxytocin in the brain, and enhanced production of the stress hormone vasopressin.