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An Examination of the Components of Toxic Stress in Childhood and Biological Markers of Physical Health in Emerging Adulthood

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Abstract

Experiencing severe and enduring adversity in childhood without the support of adult figures has been linked to an extensive list of physical health outcomes. This finding is closely tied to the concept of toxic stress, which is regularly studied using a combination of sources, including childhood adversity, unmet basic needs, and unmet social needs. Despite these findings, previous work has typically compiled various sources associated with toxic stress into a single construct, limiting existing knowledge on the contribution of each individual source to physical health. To address these concerns, the current study utilizes data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to examine the association between independent and collective sources of toxic stress in childhood and individual differences in biomarkers tapping cardiometabolic functioning in emerging adulthood. Results indicate a significant association between a composite measure of sources of toxic stress and cardiometabolic risk, with subsequent models examining the independent influence of each source revealing that this association was largely driven by childhood adversity and unmet basic needs, but not unmet social needs. These findings suggest that the individual sources of toxic stress may differentially contribute to physical health outcomes.

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Data Availability

The Add Health extensive restricted-use data used for this research is only available through a contractual agreement. To ensure eligibility to data access, researchers of the current study obtained an IRB-approved security plan for the management of the data and each member signed a Supplemental Agreement and a Data Use Contract. More information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth).

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Acknowledgements

This research uses data from National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. The original research team received approval from the Institutional Review Board from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill prior to data collection.

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  1. School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, NE, 68182-0149, USA

    Amber E. Krushas

  2. College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, 32312-1273, USA

    Joseph A. Schwartz

  3. Center for Social and Humanities Research, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

    Joseph A. Schwartz

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Krushas, A.E., Schwartz, J.A. An Examination of the Components of Toxic Stress in Childhood and Biological Markers of Physical Health in Emerging Adulthood. Journ Child Adol Trauma 15, 105–119 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-022-00436-7

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