Faculty Articles
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-22-2014
Publication Title
Translational Psychiatry
Volume
4
First Page
e413
ISSN
2158-3188
Abstract/Excerpt
Exposure to psychological trauma (for example, childhood/early life adversity, exposure to violence or assault, combat exposure, accidents or natural disasters) is known to increase one's risk of developing certain chronic medical conditions. Clinical and population studies provide evidence of systemic inflammatory activity in trauma survivors with various psychiatric and nonpsychiatric conditions. This transdiagnostic meta-analysis quantitatively integrates the literature on the relationship of inflammatory biomarkers to trauma exposure and related symptomatology. We conducted random effects meta-analyses relating trauma exposure to log-transformed inflammatory biomarker concentrations, using meta-regression models to test the effects of study quality and psychiatric symptomatology on the inflammatory outcomes. Across k=36 independent samples and n=14,991 participants, trauma exposure was positively associated with C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α (mean rs =0.2455, 0.3067, 0.2890, and 0.2998, respectively). No significant relationships were noted with fibrinogen, IL-2, IL-4, IL-8, or IL-10. In meta-regression models, the presence of psychiatric symptoms was a significant predictor of increased effect sizes for IL-1β and IL-6 (β=1.0175 and 0.3568, respectively), whereas study quality assessment scores were associated with increased effect sizes for IL-6 (β=0.3812). Positive correlations between inflammation and trauma exposure across a range of sample types and diagnoses were found. Although reviewed studies spanned an array of populations, research on any one specific psychiatric diagnosis was generally limited to one or two studies. The results suggest that chronic inflammation likely represents one potential mechanism underlying risk of health problems in trauma survivors.
DOI
10.1038/tp.2014.56
ORCID ID
0000-0002-9295-0649
PubMed ID
25050993
NSUWorks Citation
Tursich, M.,
Neufeld, R.,
Frewen, P.,
Harricharan, S.,
Kibler, J.,
Rhind, S.,
Lanius, R.
(2014). Association of trauma exposure with proinflammatory activity: a transdiagnostic meta-analysis.. Translational Psychiatry, 4, e413.
Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cps_facarticles/2029
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited
This research was supported by the Canadian Institute of Military and Veteran Health Research and by a Chancellor’s Faculty Research and Development Grant from Nova Southeastern University. We thank all the primary authors who gave information regarding their articles, including the following individuals who provided data for this project: E Bertone-Johnson, M Cohen, LW Janusek, JK Kiecolt-Glaser, V Mondelli and N Hepgul, TWW Pace and CM Heim, KJ Ressler and AK Smith, N Slopen, C Spitzer, GE Tietjen and J Khubchandani, R von Känel, and A Woods.