Children who suffer violence—abuse, bullying, domestic violence, or assault—carry measurable biological and psychological marks into young adulthood that signal future disease risk. The problem this research tackles is a gap in knowledge: while it is known that childhood stress harms health, it is not clear whether cumulative violence exposure before age 18 leaves detectable early-warning signs in the mind and body by the time a person reaches adulthood. The researchers will test this by following a group of British twins from birth to age 18, measuring psychiatric symptoms, cognitive performance, telomere length, obesity and inflammation markers, and gene expression patterns. They will compare these markers against each twin’s documented history of violence exposure. If the hypothesis holds, the impact could shift how public health and medicine approach disease prevention. Instead of waiting for adult illnesses to emerge, clinicians could identify at-risk children and adolescents early, targeting stress-related conditions before they become full-blown disease. This would mean that reducing violence exposure—or treating its effects promptly—could lower the future burden of heart disease, diabetes, depression, and other chronic conditions. The research is fundamentally about early detection, not immediate treatment, but its success would provide a clear biological and psychological target for intervention.
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We propose to examine the hypothesis that being exposed to violence in childhood and adolescence increase individuals? risk of poor mental and physical health already in early adult life. Specifically, we will test whether young people who suffer violence exposure (physical or sexual maltreatment, witnessing parental domestic violence, bullying victimisation, assaults) will, by their entry to young adulthood at age 18, show signs of risks for developing diseases in later life. We will test this hypothesis in the context of the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, a longitudinal study from birth to age 18 of twin children growing up in Britain. Here we propose to assess the cohort again at age 18, for new data collection. Each cohort member?s history of exposure to violence will be defined using data from repeated home-visit assessments of exposure to physical maltreatment, sexual abuse, bullying, parents? domestic violence, dating violence and assault victimisation across multiple years. We will assess the twins? perceptions of their violence exposure, as well as measures of risks for diseases later in later life: a) psychiatric syndromes, b) neuropsychological tests of working memory, executive functions and reaction times, c) telomere erosion, d) obesity and inflammation biomarkers, e) DNA methylation profiles and f) expression of selected genes. We selected these markers because they are thought to be sensitive to stress and are early warning signs for adult physical and psychiatric diseases. The hope of preventing diseases and of increasing health expectancy requires research to identify candidate risk targets that can be tackled successfully in early life. If the hypothesis that exposure to violence in childhood and adolescence leaves marks on the mind and body in early adult life was shown to be true by our proposed research, this would imply that the burden of adult disease could be reduced by successfully treating early, before becoming a disease, conditions in children exposed to stress early in life.
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