Association between Early-Life-Stress and Psycho-Cardio-Metabolic Multi-Morbidity: The EarlyCause H2020 Project

Early-life stress can be defined as the perinatal or childhood experience of adverse events. It is a risk factor for mental and physical diseases later in life. Since depression, cardiovascular diseases, and metabolic diseases have been found to occur together, one may suspect them to have common behavioural and biological mechanisms. Although the relationship between early-life stress and various individual mental and physical diseases has been previously established, the relationship between early-life stress and the co-occurrence of depression, coronary heart disease, and type 2 diabetes has not yet been addressed. Since the co-occurrence of these diseases implies a heavier health burden for individuals and societies, research on precursors of this co-occurrence is crucial. Therefore, this research project seeks to develop a better understanding of the way early-life stress is associated with the co-occurrence of psychopathology, cardiac disease, and metabolic disease.
Specifically, EarlyCause is a European research project of 14 participating institutions, which aims to evaluate the relationship between early-life stress and the co-occurrence of depression, coronary heart disease, and type 2 diabetes (www.earlycause.eu). Potential common biological mechanisms between early-life stress and the co-occurrence of diseases (e.g. inflammation, neuroendocrine) will be evaluated as well as potential modifying factors (e.g. lifestyle factors). The findings will provide a better understanding of the way early-life stress influences adult health, thereby enabling the identification of risk groups and setting the stage for the development of early interventions to buffer the potential long-term negative health consequences.
We expect this project to take 36 months and the findings to impact public health policies on a global scale. If childhood maltreatment is found to be associated with the adult co-occurrence of diseases, policy makers will be able to use the findings to develop early interventions promoting lifestyles that prevent the onset of the diseases. Avoiding an escalation of adult pathologies among childhood maltreatment survivors will save individuals suffering and societies costs.