BY KATHRYN DOYLE
Mon Jan 26, 2015 3:28pm EST
(Reuters Health) – Kids who were raised in a Romanian institution for abandoned children have smaller heads, smaller brains, and different white matter structure than similar kids who were moved into high-quality foster care at an early age.
Even those who were moved into foster care by age two have noticeably different brains from children raised in biological families.
The findings show that the brain’s wiring “is profoundly interrupted and perturbed and changed by neglect,” said senior author Charles A. Nelson of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
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Comparing adopted and unadopted kids in orphanages is often difficult to do – the kids who were adopted may have been better off than the others in some way. But this study sent kids to foster homes randomly, making the results much more reliable, said Michael E. Behen, a clinical psychologist/neuroscientist in the Translational Imaging Center at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, who is not part of the study.
“We do find similar things for kids who are adopted to an enriched environment in the U.S. or Canada,” Behen told Reuters Health by phone. “We sort of find that over time in that adoptive environment some things seem to normalize.”
In the U.S., children are generally not raised from birth in institutions, but there are foster care situations with varying levels of neglect, and these results will be important for policy makers, Behen said.
SOURCE: bit.ly/15D2g70 JAMA Pediatrics, January 26, 2015.
