After studying children who grew up in Romania’s infamous orphanages, researchers at King’s College London have found “compelling” evidence that child neglect has permanent effects on an individual’s brain, the BBC reports.
While previous research on 165 children adopted from Romanian orphanages into UK families in 2017 found that 4 out of 5 children adopted from the orphanages continued to experience mental health problems related to their child neglect, this new research shows that their childhood trauma has physically changed them.
The study, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, found that when compared to other adoptees, the adult brains of Romanian orphanage survivors were 8.6% smaller.
Researchers performed the study by comparing brain scans from 67 different Romanian adoptees who had spent varying amounts of time in the orphanages before being adopted into the UK with brain scans from 21 other adults who had been adopted into the UK, the Guardian reports.
One of the researchers, professor Edmund Sonunga-Barke, told BBC that the longer the children spent in Romanian orphanages, the more their brain size diminished.
Yahoo News reports that each additional month spend in the orphanage decreased brain size by 0.27%
“The idea that everything is recoverable, no matter what your experience ... isn’t necessarily true — even with the best care you can still see those signs of that earlier adversity,” Sonunga-Barke told the Guardian.
While brain size doesn’t always equate with intelligence, the lead author of the study, professor Mitul Mehta, clarified in a quote to Yahoo News that the brains of Romanian orphans were found to be structurally different in three key regions of the brain that control organization, memory integration and motivation.