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Early Life SES, Childhood Trauma Exposures, and Cardiovascular Responses to Daily Life Stressors in Middle-aged Adults

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Abstract

Background

Dysregulation in physiological responses to stress may provide a mechanism through which low socioeconomic status (SES) in childhood negatively impacts health. Evidence linking early life SES to physiological stress responses is inconsistent. Exposure to childhood trauma may be an important source of heterogeneity accounting for mixed findings. Guided by the adaptive calibration model, we examined whether childhood SES and childhood trauma jointly predict ambulatory measures of cardiovascular responses to daily life stressors.

Method

A sample of 377 healthy, middle-aged adults (62% female, 80% White, 64% college-educated, Mage = 52.59 ± 7.16) completed a 4-day ecological momentary assessment protocol that measured task strain, social conflict, and ambulatory systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP and DBP, respectively) at hourly intervals throughout the day. Average ambulatory blood pressure responses to stress were calculated by regressing momentary SBP and DBP on momentary measures of stress within the multilevel models. Early life SES and childhood trauma were measured retrospectively by self-report questionnaire.

Results

Multilevel models controlling for momentary influences on blood pressure and age, sex, and race showed no main effects of early life SES or childhood trauma on ambulatory measures of cardiovascular responses to daily life stress. An interaction emerged for DBP responses to social conflict, where individuals raised in middle SES families who experienced trauma showed a blunted response relative to those who did not (\({\gamma }_{14}=\)−0.93, 95% CI: [−1.62, −0.24], p = .008). There was no significant SES-trauma interaction in predicting SBP responses to social conflict or blood pressure responses to task strain.

Conclusion

Results do not provide support for our predictions that were derived from the adaptive calibration model, but do suggest that the impacts of early childhood experiences on cardiovascular responses may vary by type of daily stress experience.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the participants who committed their time and shared their daily life experiences with us over the course of this study. We would also like to acknowledge Dr. Barbara Anderson for her contribution to data collection.

Funding

This research is funded by the Heart Lung and Blood Institute (4T32HL007560) and the National Institutes of Aging (AG041778).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Kristina D. Dickman, Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, Karen A. Matthews & Thomas W. Kamarck

  2. Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Karen A. Matthews & Thomas W. Kamarck

  3. Department of Epidemiology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Karen A. Matthews

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  1. Kristina D. Dickman
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Correspondence to Kristina D. Dickman.

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Dickman, K.D., Votruba-Drzal, E., Matthews, K.A. et al. Early Life SES, Childhood Trauma Exposures, and Cardiovascular Responses to Daily Life Stressors in Middle-aged Adults. Int.J. Behav. Med. 30, 801–813 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-022-10141-2

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