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Childhood emotional and sexual abuse mark women’s brains in distinct patterns — with emotional abuse affecting regions involved in self-awareness and sexual abuse affecting areas involved in genital sensation, according to new research.

The study links specific types of abuse with symptoms experienced by many survivors later in life.

The research, which was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, imaged the brains of 51 women in Atlanta who were taking part in a larger project on the effects of early trauma.

Twenty-eight of the participants had been seriously maltreated as children, suffering from various combinations of neglect and emotional, physical and sexual abuse. The other 23 experienced either no maltreatment or next to nothing. The women ranged in age from 18 to 45, but the average age was 27.

A standard questionnaire on childhood trauma was used to assess the women’s early-childhood experiences, and their brains were scanned to measure the thickness of various regions of the cortex.

Cortical thickness is linked to brain development, with thicker regions generally suggesting healthier growth. Brains, like muscles, develop through use — so regions that have been “exercised” more tend to be bigger.

Full story of sex and emotional abuse on the brain at CNN Health

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Beedie Savage – President of Quantum Units Education

An analysis of jailhouse phone calls between men charged with felony domestic violence and their victims allowed researchers for the first time to see exactly what triggered episodes of violent abuse.

The findings showed that violence often immediately followed accusations of sexual infidelity made by one or both of the partners. Drug or alcohol use was often involved.

Researchers have long known that sexual jealousy played a general role in abuse, but this is the first time it was shown that it was a specific form of jealousy — infidelity concerns — that tended to initiate the violence, said Julianna Nemeth, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in public health at Ohio State University.

"What we were looking for was the immediate precursor — what was the one thing that happened right before the violence that was the catalyst," Nemeth said.

"I have worked in domestic violence intervention for many years, but still the findings shocked me. We never knew that it was the accusation of infidelity that tended to trigger the violence."

Full story of domestic abusers at Science Daily

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U.S. Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) this week introduced new bipartisan legislation to prevent the abuse of cough syrup to get high, a particularly worrisome trend among American teens.

Dextromethorphan (DXM) is the active ingredient in many over-the-counter cough and cold medicines and is safe when taken as recommended, but 5 percent of teenagers report having intentionally taken large doses of DXM for effects that include hallucinations, confusion, blurred vision and loss of motor control.

Senator Casey’s Prevent Abuse of Cough Treatments (PACT) Act will make it harder for teens to purchase the drug for this dangerous use, while still keeping cough medications accessible to those who use them for their intended purpose.

Full story of cough syrup at DrugFree.org

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Sexually abused boys are also three times more likely to have multiple sexual partners and twice as likely to engage in unprotected sex.

Published online in advance of the Journal of Adolescent Health’s June issue, the UBC study explores links between sexual abuse and risky sexual behavior, focusing on three areas: teen pregnancy, multiple sexual partners and unprotected sexual intercourse.

The researchers analyzed 10 sets of Canadian and U.S. survey data from two decades of published studies. Conducted between 1986 and 2011, the surveys were completed anonymously by more than 40,000 male high school students in B.C. and across the U.S., including states such as Oregon, Vermont, Minnesota and Massachusetts.

"As far as we know, this is the first study to explore the strength of the effects of sexual abuse on boys’ sexual behavior," says lead author Yuko Homma, a recent PhD graduate from the UBC School of Nursing.

Full story of abused boys at Science Daily

By Maia Szalavitz

Child maltreatment has been called the tobacco industry of mental health. Much the way smoking directly causes or triggers predispositions for physical disease, early abuse may contribute to virtually all types of mental illness.

Now, in the largest study yet to use brain scans to show the effects of child abuse, researchers have found specific changes in key regions in and around the hippocampus in the brains of young adults who were maltreated or neglected in childhood. These changes may leave victims more vulnerable to depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the study suggests.

Harvard researchers led by Dr. Martin Teicher studied nearly 200 people aged 18 to 25, who were mainly middle class and well-educated. They were recruited through newspaper and transit ads for a study on “memories of childhood.” Because the authors wanted to look specifically at the results of abuse and neglect, people who had suffered other types of trauma like car accidents or gang violence were excluded.

Full story at Time