Maltreatment-associated neurodevelopmental disorders: a co-twin control analysis

Duration: 7 mins Publication Date: 9 Feb 2019 Next Review Date: 9 Feb 2022 DOI: 10.13056/acamh.10471

Description

In this Video Abstract Professor Helen Minnis and Lisa Dinkler discuss their paper 'Maltreatment-associated neurodevelopmental disorders: a co-twin control analysis'. Childhood maltreatment (CM) is strongly associated with psychiatric disorders in childhood and adulthood. Previous findings suggest that the association between CM and psychiatric disorders is partly causal and partly due to familial confounding, but few studies have investigated the mechanisms behind the association between CM and neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). Our objective was to determine whether maltreated children have an elevated number of NDDs and whether CM is a risk factor for an increased NDD ‘load’ and increased NDD symptoms when controlling for familial effects.

Learning Objectives

1. Discover if there an increased number of neurodevelopmental disorders in maltreated children compared to children from the general population.
2. Learn if individual disorders, (ADHD, ASD, etc) have an increase in symptoms of those individual disorders associated with maltreatment.