{"id":1428,"date":"2018-10-02T18:11:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-02T18:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coolblues.bcmultistaging.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=1428"},"modified":"2026-01-20T18:55:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T18:55:11","slug":"child-abuse-molecular-scars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/2018\/10\/02\/child-abuse-molecular-scars\/","title":{"rendered":"Child abuse could leave \u2018molecular scars\u2019 on its victims"},"content":{"rendered":"

Children who are abused might carry the imprint of that trauma in their cells \u2013 a biochemical marking that is detectable years later, according to new research from BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of British Columbia and Harvard University.<\/p>\n\n

The findings, based on a comparison of chemical tags on the DNA of 34 adult men, still need confirmation from larger studies, and researchers don\u2019t know if this tagging\u2014known as methylation\u2014affects the victims\u2019 health.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n

\u201cMethylation is starting to be viewed as a potentially useful tool in criminal investigations \u2013 for example, by providing investigators with an approximate age of a person who left behind a sample of their DNA,\u201d said senior author\u00a0Dr. Michael Kobor,<\/a>\u00a0a BC Children’s Hospital investigator and medical genetics professor at UBC. \u201cSo it\u2019s conceivable that the correlations we found between methylation and child abuse might provide a percentage probability that abuse had occurred.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Read more<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Children who are abused might carry the imprint of that trauma in their cells \u2013 a biochemical marking that is detectable years later, according to new research from BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of British Columbia and Harvard University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","fndry_alternate_title":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"modified_by":"Andrea Sakamoto","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2261,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions\/2261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bcchr.ca\/kobor-lab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}