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Childhood Adversities as Determinants of Cardiovascular Disease Risk and Perceived Illness Burden in Adulthood: Comparing Retrospective and Prospective Self-Report Measures in a Longitudinal Sample of African Americans

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Abstract

A large body of evidence suggests that exposure to childhood adversities increases risk for poor quality physical health in adulthood. Much of this evidence is based on retrospective measures which are believed to be contaminated by the limitations and biases of autobiographical memory. Using longitudinal data on 454 African Americans (61 percent female) this study examines the corroboration between prospective and retrospective measures of childhood adversities gathered approximately two decades apart, and the relative ability of the measures to predict self-reported illnesses and a biomarker of 30-year cardiovascular disease risk. Comparisons indicated that the retrospective and prospective measures demonstrated weak convergence and did not provide completely equivalent information about self-reported adverse childhood experiences. A series of regression models indicated that the two measures of adversities exhibited similar associations with the cardiovascular disease biomarker but divergent associations with self-reported illnesses. Furthermore, both the prospective and retrospective measures simultaneously predicted cardiovascular disease risk in adulthood. That the prospective measure did not significantly predict perceived illnesses after adjusting for the retrospective measure is evidence that childhood adversities predict self-reported health burden insofar as respondents remember those adversities as adults. The findings provide evidence that retrospective self-report measures of childhood adversities do not closely converge with prospective measures, and that retrospective measures may not provide valid estimates of the association between childhood adversities and perceived illnesses in adulthood.

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Notes

  1. Also, it may be that concurrent (adult) reports of limited childhood adversities predict self-reported illnesses even among adults who reported adverse events as children.

  2. Adults with optimal health might also tend to forget or not report adverse childhood experiences (Hardt and Rutter 2004:267).

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute (R01 HL118045), the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD080749), the National Institute on Aging (R01 AG055393), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R21 DA034457), the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH62699, R01 MH62666), and the Center for Disease Control (1 R49 CE003095-01). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control. Research Fellowship support for this project was also provided to the first author by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, 52242, USA

    Mark T. Berg

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Man-Kit Lei, Ronald L. Simons & Leslie Gordon Simons

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Steven R. Beach

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  1. Mark T. Berg
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  2. Man-Kit Lei
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  3. Steven R. Beach
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Contributions

M.T.B. conceived of the study and drafted the manuscript; M.K.L. conceived of the study, participated in the construction of measures, statistical analysis, and drafted the manuscript; R.L.S., L.G.S., and S.R.B. made substantive contributions to the manuscript regarding interpretation of the findings. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Mark T. Berg.

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Standards of ethical responsibility have been followed. None of the findings in this paper have been published elsewhere. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. The order of authorship reflects the relative level of contribution make by each of the authors. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964. Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The Institutional Review Board of the University of Georgia approval the study and its informed consent procedures.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Measures of Childhood Adversity across Retrospective and Prospective Reports

Items

Retrospective measures

Prospective measures

1

I didn’t have enough to eat at home

My family did not have enough money to afford the kind of food we need

2

I had to wear old or dirty clothes or clothes that did not fit

My family did not have enough money to afford the kind of clothing we need

3

People in my family hit me so hard that it left me with bruises or marks

My parents slap or hit me hard

4

I was punished with a belt, a board, a cord, or some other object

My parents hit me with a belt, a paddle, or something else

5

There was a lot of violence in my neighborhood

There was a lot of violent crime in my neighborhood

6

There was a lot of graffiti and run-down buildings in my neighborhood

In my neighborhood, there was graffiti on buildings and walls

7

A family member was the victim of a crime

A family member was a victim of a violent crime

8

Did your parents separate or divorce?

Did your parents separate or divorce?

9

Someone said something insulting to you because of your race or ethnic background

Someone said something insulting to you because of your race or ethnic background

10

Members of your family or close friends were treated unfairly

Members of your family or close friends were treated unfairly

Appendix 2: Regression Models Predicting Logged C-reactive Protein and Self-Reported Chronic Diseases in Adulthood

 

C-reactive protein

Chronic diseases

b

β

b

β

Childhood adversity (prospective)

0.007 (0.017)

0.020

0.044 (0.022)

0.092

Childhood adversity (retrospective)

−0.004 (0.016)

−0.012

0.085** (0.020)

0.199

  1. Unstandardized coefficients (b) and standardized coefficients (β) shown with standard errors in parentheses; N = 454
  2. *p ≤ 0.05; **p ≤ 0.01 (two-tailed tests)

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Berg, M.T., Lei, MK., Beach, S.R. et al. Childhood Adversities as Determinants of Cardiovascular Disease Risk and Perceived Illness Burden in Adulthood: Comparing Retrospective and Prospective Self-Report Measures in a Longitudinal Sample of African Americans. J Youth Adolescence 49, 1292–1308 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01207-z

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