Developmental Impact of Early Life Stress and Schizophrenia: An up to Date Review on the Psycho-Neurobiological Dysregulation

Rationale; The study of the possible effects of early life stress (ELS) on later human behavior and neurobiology is a rapidly growing field. While epidemiological and neurobiological studies paint a grim picture of negative consequences, little attention has been paid to integrating the diverse evidence on possible cognitive and emotional deficits associated with ELS. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of perinatal mental disorders such as schizophrenia provide a new framework for understanding the mechanisms underlying ELS sequelae ranging from psychopathology to alterations in brain morphology. Objective: The aim of this review was threefold. The first was to summarize the results of longitudinal data on the effects of perinatal stress on the development of mental illness in children. The second goal was to interpolate the effects of parental psychopathology on cognition. Third, to use this framework of normative brain development to interpret changes in developmental trajectories associated with deficits in cognitive and affective functioning after ELS. Results: While ELS is associated with a variety of effects later in life, five normative principles of brain development were identified and used in this review to discuss the behavioral and neural consequences of ELS. Early adversity has been associated with deficits in a variety of cognitive (cognitive performance, memory, and executive functions) and affective (reward processing, processing of social and affective stimuli, and emotion regulation) functions. Conclusion; we reached three general conclusions: (1) complex higher-order cognitive and affective functions associated with brain regions that have undergone prolonged postnatal development are particularly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of ELS (2) astrocytes in the hippocampus and orbital frontal cortices are particularly sensitive to early ELS; and (3) several deficits, particularly in the affective domain, appear to persist years after the end of ELS. However, there is no clear correlation between parental psychopathology during the perinatal period and the other two domains, cognitive and psychomotor, which may further explain the increased risk for later psychopathology.