Child abuse and maltratment: clinical, genetic and epigenetic correlates.

Significant progress has been obtained in the knowledge of mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disorders caused by Early-Life Stress (ELS). Research efforts have been focused on detrimental effects of childhood abuse, as a powerful environmental stressor of mental and health consequences. While the association between abuse in childhood and adverse adult health outcomes is well established, this link is infrequently acknowledged in the general medical literature. International strategies in safeguarding of minors promoted by World Health Organization (WHO), Unicef and Terre des Hommes are moving towards more interdisciplinary endeavours that may deliver innovative solutions to the challenges required by such a multifaceted problem, which not longer involves only specialized social service, health, mental health, and justice systems, but rather needs advanced competences in neurogenomics for implementing a new approach more efficient on diagnosis, prevention and personalized therapies. In view of a translational approach, our project was born to pursuit two purposes: (1) to provide a broad overview of the research on the long-term effects of child abuse on mental and physical health, including some of the potential molecular pathways; (2) to call for collaborative action among clinicians, psychosocial and biomedical researchers, to take a comprehensive approach to both preventing and dealing with the sequelae of childhood abuse. Here, we describes our progress in the detection of a genomic and epigenomic profile on some candidate genes associated with a distinct type of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), with a specific clinical and neuropsychological pattern, which we first called Child Abuse Syndrome, (CAS), observed in maltreated children and adult survivors of child abuse. We aimed at identify a panel of epigenetic and genetic risk variants assocaited with CAS in order to implement new pre-emptive measure to: (i) early diagnosis by genomic screening test; (ii) treatment by selecting drugs clinically more responsive and epigenetically active coumpounds able to revert some aberrant regulation changes in brain, and (iii) rehabilitation to develop new combined therapies according to a biopsychosocial model empowering individual resilience.