Interactions between childhood maltreatment and combat exposure trauma on stress-related activity within the cingulate cortex: a pilot study

ABSTRACT

Childhood trauma may sensitize the brain, increasing vulnerability to maladaptive stress responses following adulthood trauma exposure. Previous work has identified the cingulum as a white matter pathway that may be sensitized to adulthood trauma by childhood maltreatment. In this pilot study of young adult male military veterans (N = 28), we examined a priori regions of interest (ROIs) connected by the cingulum, including regions involved in cognitive processes and stress responses. Our goal was to examine the interaction between childhood maltreatment and combat exposure on stress-related activity within cingulum-associated ROIs. As such we utilized a mild cognitive stress task, a performance-titrated multi-source interference task (MSIT). We found that childhood maltreatment moderated the effect of combat exposure on stress-related, interference-evoked activity within the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC, activation), subgenual ACC (sgACC, deactivation) and posterior midcingulate cortex (pMCC, deactivation). Greater combat exposure was associated with greater interference-evoked activation within the dACC, and less sgACC and pMCC deactivation among individuals with more severe childhood maltreatment. Our findings suggest that child maltreatment sensitizes these anterior and mid-cingulate regions to later life trauma. These findings may have implications for cognitive control, autonomic regulation/stress reactivity, and responses to noxious/aversive stimuli, which may contribute to increased psychiatric vulnerability.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood maltreatment
• combat exposure
• cingulate cortex
• stress
• functional MRI

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Benjamin Paul, Ashlee McKeon, Ryan Stocker, Noelle Rode and Hassen Khan for their assistance with participant screening, MRI procedures, and data organization.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no competing financial interests. Anne Germain, Ph.D., has no conflict of interest related to this work. She serves as CEO and holds equity in Rehat, LLC. She has also served as a consultant for Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at www.tandfonline.com/hmlp.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) Pilot Research Award [R.J.H.], the National Institute of Mental Health [MH102406-01 to L.B., MH096944 to M.L.W., MH080696 and MH083035 to A.G., and MH100267 to R.J.H.], and the Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program [PT073961 and PR054093 to A.G.].