Positive associations have been found between a range of childhood adversities and headache, including economic hardship, 16 parental separation, 20 poor family environment or neglect, 21 and potentially traumatic events such as disaster, 22 exposure to abuse 23 24 and bullying.
Low birth weight can be indicative of a range of prenatal adversities such as maternal psychological stress, alcohol, drug abuse, or smoking during pregnancy.
Research suggests that the development of allostatic load might be more influenced by the accumulation of a range of different adversities than by single exposures [ 12, 13] but also that it might be important to take different types of demands into consideration [ 14].
Adversity encompasses a range of functional impairment; the U.S. EPA Integrated Risk Information System (U.S. EPA 2005b) defines an adverse effect as "a biochemical change, functional impairment, or pathologic lesion that affects the performance of the whole organism, or reduces an organism's ability to respond to an additional environmental challenge".
This study explored possible links between early life adversity, intermediary phenotypes, and a range of poorer health outcomes in deprived communities.
As well as depressive symptoms, exposure to childhood family adversities exerts nonspecific risks for a range of psychopathologies throughout adolescence into young adult life (Green et al., 2010; Shanahan et al., 2011).
Limitations of this approach are that PTSD treatments are usually relatively intensive and lengthy, and individuals affected by adversity and trauma typically have a range of other problems than PTSD, including depression and anxiety [ 2].
5 A range of environmental risk factors may contribute to the remaining variance in liability, including adverse life events, poverty, childhood adversity and physical disease.
Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived.
Assessing a range of resilience promoting processes would allow key research questions about human adaptation to adversity to be addressed [ 52].
