Citation

Bush NR, Aschbacher K. JAMA Pediatr. 2019; ePub(ePub): 1-3.

Affiliation

Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, American Medical Association)

DOI

10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.3882

PMID

31682710

Abstract

Evidence of an association between early-life adversity and heightened risk of chronic disease in adulthood has been found, but the optimal biomarkers for identifying vulnerable or resilient individuals remain unclear. Global trends, including widening socioeconomic disparities, the refugee crises, and climate change, increasingly sculpt trauma exposure and call for scalable early-risk identification and treatment strategies. Pediatricians often serve on the frontline of early identification and treatment of at-risk children, intervening during crucial windows of opportunity to prevent longer-term bioembedding that confers risk of disease across the life course. However, problems of scale need solutions that scale, which is one reason why the discoveries by Rasmussen et al, reported in this issue, represent a promising step forward. Using high-quality assessments of multidomain, multireporter adversity exposure, these investigators present prospective, longitudinal evidence from a large, socioeconomically diverse sample that soluble urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (suPAR) may be a useful immune biomarker of early-life adversity, having a stronger and more exposure-specific association than current clinical markers, such as C-reactive protein. This type of rigorous epidemiologic “big data” work, complemented with “deep data,” will accelerate biomarker discovery for clinical diagnosis and treatment of early risk and resilience profiles and provide the foundation for precision medicine strategies in pediatrics.

Language: en