Nelson – MRI results

The last two findings in the project right now that are more biological is we did MRIs on all of our kids and we also measure what’s called telomere length and I’ll come back to that in a moment. The reason we looked at the MRIs is that we noticed our children has smaller heads and that they had underpowered brain activity, that is they had less EEG activity. Well sure enough now that we’ve done MRIs on them we find the children in the institution have less grey matter; grey matter refers to the cell bodies, and less white matter, which means the parts of the brain that have myelin associated with them, so there’s a dramatic reduction in both and that means their total brain volume is reduced, so they have smaller brains which accounts for smaller heads and underpowered brain activity.  

The kids we put in foster care show no difference in grey matter; the grey matter’s not changing, but they are showing an increase in white matter which is good, and that probably accounts for the normalization of the EEG we also see. Now telomere refers to the cap of a chromosome and it protects the chromosome through the thousands and thousands of cell divisions all cells undergo, except the brain, throughout the lifespan. So when you cut yourself your cell repairs itself. So the telomere region is designed to protect the cell through all those divisions it’s going to undergo, but it’s also a region that’s very sensitive to oxidative stress and the like. We find that children in the institutional group actually have shortened telomeres. So we’re showing a biological toll of this early adversity that it is the telomere region gets shorter and the reason that’s so important is the telomere region can only shrink so much before the cell will stop dividing and the cell dies. So we think there are going to be long term health consequences for this as well.