Associations between childhood family stress and systemic inflammation in adulthood: Contributions of pubertal timing and waist circumference in adolescence.
Prospective study reveals that childhood family stress increases adult inflammation via adolescent adiposity in women, highlighting early pathways to cardiometabolic risk.
Key Points
To examine prospective associations between childhood family stress and systemic inflammation in early adulthood among women, testing pubertal timing and adolescent adiposity as biobehavioral mediators.
Followed female participants into early adulthood (mean age = 23.57 years) to evaluate the impact of childhood family environment.
Assessed age at menarche and waist circumference at age 12 as potential mediators using structural equation modeling, controlling for household public assistance between ages 5 and 9.
Childhood family stress was indirectly related to adult interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels via pubertal timing (β = .01, 95% CI [0.000, 0.004]) and waist circumference (β = .05, 95% CI [0.002, 0.021]; direct effect p = .011).
In dual-mediator models, only adolescent waist circumference contributed independent variance to the link between childhood stress and adult IL-6, with patterns showing variations across racial groups.