Children who are abused might carry the imprint of that trauma in their cells – 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.
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’t know if this tagging — known as methylation — affects the victims’ health.
But the difference in methylation between those who had been abused and those who had not – if it is replicated in larger studies and can be described in greater detail — might one day be useful as a biomarker for investigators or courts in weighing allegations of child abuse.
“Methylation is starting to be viewed as a potentially useful tool in criminal investigations — for example, by providing investigators with an approximate age of a person who left behind a sample of their DNA,” said senior author Dr. Michael Kobor, a BC Children’s Hospital investigator and medical genetics professor at UBC. “So it’s conceivable that the correlations we found between methylation and child abuse might provide a percentage probability that abuse had occurred.”
