How Childhood Adversity May Show Up in the Body Decades Later

This 2025 review pooled studies that used epigenetic clocks, markers on DNA that estimate the body's biological age, to test whether difficult childhood experiences leave a lasting trace. Across the evidence, greater childhood adversity was associated with a modest acceleration of biological ageing in adulthood. The authors were candid about the limits: results differed depending on which epigenetic clock was used, and most studies had not adjusted for factors like smoking, body weight and social circumstances that also shape ageing, so the certainty is graded as early. The value of the work is in giving measurable form to a familiar intuition, that what the body carried early can echo in health much later. It also points towards a hopeful question the field is now asking, whether some of that trace can be slowed by the conditions and support a person has as an adult.