The impact of adversities across the lifespan on psychological symptom profiles in late adulthood: a latent profile analysis

Abstract

People commonly face adverse circumstances throughout life, which increases risk for psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, depression, psychosis, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Adversities may occur during different periods in life. Especially adversity during early periods has been suggested to put individuals at risk for adverse mental health outcomes. Here, we investigated whether timing of adversity during the prenatal period, childhood, or mid-to-late adulthood differentially impacted classification into late adulthood symptom profiles. We performed sex-stratified Latent Profile Analysis to identify latent profiles regarding anxious, depressive, psychotic, and PTSD symptoms in n = 568 Dutch famine birth cohort members (n = 294 women, n = 274 men, mean age(SD) = 72.9(0.8)). Cross-sectional late adulthood symptomatology, childhood traumatic maltreatment, and adulthood trauma were based on self-report questionnaires. Prenatal adversity was considered present when individuals were prenatally exposed to the 1944-45 Dutch famine. In both men and women we identified one anxious/depressive profile and three profiles with approximately equal severity of all symptom types within each profile, yet differentiating in overall severity (low, mild, high) between profiles. We additionally found a PTSD symptom profile in women. In men, logistic regression models showed significant associations between prenatal, childhood and adulthood adversity, and profile classification, with differential effects depending on timing and most profound effects of child maltreatment. In women, childhood and adulthood adversity significantly increased classification probability into almost all profiles, with no significant effect of prenatal adversity. These findings support a time-dependent and sex-specific impact of adversity during different periods across the lifespan on psychological health, with consequences into late adulthood.

Programming the next generation of prenatal programming of stress research: A review and suggestions for the future of the field

“…In one exception, a very small sample using the naturalistic experiment of a severe ice storm found associations between maternal pregnancy exposure and broad autism phenotype in offspring during young adulthood (Li et al, 2023). In a larger sample, extensions of the Dutch Famine Study into late adulthood (mean age 73 years) continue to find effects of adversity in pregnancy and psychological health at these older ages (Hilberdink et al, 2023). Although multidecade follow-up is still rare, the findings published to date suggest persistence of risk for many individuals.…”

“…To truly understand, examinations across all developmental timepoints, across exposure and outcome types, will be important. It is intriguing to note that in one of the few prenatal programing studies of older adults (Hilberdink et al, 2023) the consequences of pregnancy adversity on psychological health persisted into late adulthood only for men. Certainly, more work in this space will be informative.…”