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Institutionalized children had blunted sensory processing

Children raised in institutions exhibited elevated symptoms of anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression and disruptive behavior compared with controls, according to a recently published study.

Katie A. McLaughlin, PhD, director of the Stress and Development Laboratory at Boston Children’s Hospital, and colleagues from the University of Maryland and Tulane University reported the data, which were drawn from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project. The researchers measured neural processing through two tasks: “familiar and unfamiliar faces, and facial displays of emotion.” The researchers said using these two tasks is important because processing facial expression “provides essential information for effective and appropriate social interactions.”

The researchers found that “peak amplitudes of the P100,” which is associated with visual sensory processing, “and P700 in response to facial stimuli were blunted among institutionalized children compared with community children in both tasks.” They theorized this could have been attributed to institutional rearing.

McLaughlin and colleagues noted some study limitations, specifically that their testing mechanism did not assess mental health status at baseline and the fact that their results could not draw a distinction as to whether “deficits in neural functioning are face specific or represent more general visual-processing anomalies.”

The researchers said their findings should prompt further study on the effects of early adversity on later brain development, and that the results “highlight the urgency of improving environmental conditions and the caregiving context for abandoned and orphaned children.”

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.