Intellectual performance correlates of trauma exposure in adolescent psychiatric inpatients.

Half of individuals have experienced a trauma adequate to meet criteria for PTSD. Intelligence may correlate with trauma, with the causal direction unclear. The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) was administered to 733 child and adolescent inpatients. Intelligence and academic achievement was assessed using the Wechsler Scales. Clinician diagnoses came from the electronic medical record, as did data on exposure to substance abuse and other stressors. Multivariate analyses assessed associations between intelligence, diagnoses, experiences, and CTQ. Cases who met criteria for physical and sexual abuse performed more poorly across all intellectual domains. Other than for PTSD, there were no diagnostic differences in CTQ scores. Emotional abuse or neglect were not associated with intelligence, although exposure to substance abuse was associated with increased CTQ scores and lower intelligence. Exposure to substance abuse as a covariate did not eliminate the influence of CTQ scores on intelligence, but was consistently related to intelligence beyond CTQ scores. Intelligence and substance abuse are known to have genomic influences and recent studies have suggested a genomic signature associated with childhood abuse. Future genomic studies of the consequences of trauma exposure could add intelligence polygenic scores into their models, while considering genomic and nongenomic elements of family experiences.

The relationship of age and hypertension with cognition and gray matter cerebral blood volume in a rhesus monkey model of human aging.

The goal of this study was to investigate whether alterations in cerebral microvasculature, as measured by cerebral blood volume (CBV), contribute to age- and hypertension-related impairments in cognitive function with a focus on executive function and memory. Data were collected on 19 male rhesus monkeys ranging from 6.4 to 21.6 years of age. Hypertension was induced through surgical coarctation of the thoracic aorta. We assessed whether performance on tasks of memory and executive function corresponded to CBV in either the hippocampus or prefrontal cortex. We found a relationship between duration of hypertension and CBV in the gray matter of the prefrontal cortex, but not the hippocampus. No relationships were found with the degree of hypertension or age. Increased prefrontal CBV was related to greater impairment in executive function while hippocampal CBV was not related to memory performance. These findings suggest that duration, but not severity, of hypertension or age are important factors underlying alterations in brain microvasculature and that executive function is more vulnerable than memory function. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).