Child abuse is also a serious public health problem. It has been known for some time now that the consequences of psychological and physical violence suffered in childhood and adolescence can be felt over the years. Wounds are long-lasting, affect health and also remain imprinted in the DNA, reducing the length of telomeres, structures that, like caps, protect the ends of chromosomes. At birth, telomeres have a certain length that decreases over time until it reaches a minimum level beyond which the cell can no longer divide. It is already known that not only age, but also cellular stress factors, such as smoking, can accelerate its shortening, giving way to senescence. Well, the relationship between abuse and telomere length was analyzed by a large retrospective study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, which took into consideration the type of abuse and the number of episodes of violence, on a sample of 141,000 individuals aged between 37 and 73 years old, already present in the UK Biobank genetic database. concluding that a history of violence is associated with shorter telomeres, independent of other relevant factors such as socio-economic status or mental health.
«Today we talk about the consequences of child abuse not only in terms of psychic damage and a greater risk of perpetrating the same abuses suffered as children as adults, but also of real organic alterations that go so far as to condition the expressions of the DNA » underlined Pietro Ferrara of the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, national contact person of the Sip Italian Society of Pediatrics for abuse and mistreatment and scientific director of the training courses for paediatricians organized throughout the country, with the unconditional contribution of Menarini and the patronage of Sip and Fimp, the Italian Federation of Pediatricians. The project «Facing Abuse 2.0. Emergence and communication in child and adolescent abuse» intends to promote the widespread diffusion, at local and hospital level, of knowledge on the subject of abuse and mistreatment, to identify the signs early and prevent the consequences in adulthood. «As demonstrated by the English study», continues Ferrara «abused minors will become adults who not only live worse but age earlier because stress and biochemical modifications, triggered by the violence suffered, determine an erosion of telomeres, that is, of that part of the DNA that decides how long we should live, influencing our health conditions as adults. Some recent studies even tell us that the continuous and repeated stress of girls who are victims of multiple sexual abuse can lead to a higher incidence of cancer in adulthood, with a twice as high risk». From the research, published in BioMed Central Cancer and conducted by the Public Health Agency of Canada, emerges «an association between maltreatment and cancer in women, even after taking into account the effects of known risk factors. The association becomes stronger as exposure to abuse increases. The authors also discuss providing cancer screenings for abused women.
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