Lasting into early adulthood
The authors then looked at CRP levels as the study participants entered adulthood. They observed a similar pattern of findings: victims of bullying had higher levels of CRP compared to those who were not involved in bullying. Furthermore, participants who were repeatedly bullied showed the highest levels of CRP.
Surprisingly, participants who bullied others showed the lowest levels of CRP in early adulthood amongst all four groups of children examined in this study. These associations also remained after the researcher controlled for prior CRP, variables associated with CRP levels and variables associated with being involved in bullying.
We already know from previous research that being bullied in childhood “gets under the skin” and can influence other mechanisms in the body involved in the physiological responses to stress, such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. For example, bullied children show a blunted level of cortisol response – a hormone released under stress – when exposed to stress in a laboratory experiment.
A study of identical twin pairs where one twin had been bullied but the other not has shown that while non-bullied twins had a normal increase of cortisol after experiencing a social stress laboratory, their bullied co-twins showed a blunted response. And the more severe and frequent the bullying, the lower the cortisol response.
The new Duke research on the inflammatory process adds to a growing body of evidence that demonstrates that we need to move away from the perception that bullying is harmless and part of normal growing up. Instead, bullying should be considered as another form of toxic stress with potentially profound effects on mental and physical health. These effects have been repeatedly observed in childhood and increasingly so in adolescence and in adulthood too.
Lasting into early adulthoodThe authors then looked at CRP levels as the study participants entered adulthood. They observed a similar pattern of findings: victims of bullying had higher levels of CRP compared to those who were not involved in bullying. Furthermore, participants who were repeatedly bullied showed the highest levels of CRP.Surprisingly, participants who bullied others showed the lowest levels of CRP in early adulthood amongst all four groups of children examined in this study. These associations also remained after the researcher controlled for prior CRP, variables associated with CRP levels and variables associated with being involved in bullying.We already know from previous research that being bullied in childhood “gets under the skin” and can influence other mechanisms in the body involved in the physiological responses to stress, such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. For example, bullied children show a blunted level of cortisol response – a hormone released under stress – when exposed to stress in a laboratory experiment.A study of identical twin pairs where one twin had been bullied but the other not has shown that while non-bullied twins had a normal increase of cortisol after experiencing a social stress laboratory, their bullied co-twins showed a blunted response. And the more severe and frequent the bullying, the lower the cortisol response.The new Duke research on the inflammatory process adds to a growing body of evidence that demonstrates that we need to move away from the perception that bullying is harmless and part of normal growing up. Instead, bullying should be considered as another form of toxic stress with potentially profound effects on mental and physical health. These effects have been repeatedly observed in childhood and increasingly so in adolescence and in adulthood too.
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