Associations between early-life adversity, coping strategies, and adult mental health, brain, and cognition.
Overview
- Dementias Platform UK, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, OX3 7JX Oxford, UK
- Department of Experimental and Theoretical Neuroscience, Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Abstract
Early adversity is associated with later mental health, brain, and cognitive outcomes, but the pathways are complex and may involve coping strategies and individual vulnerabilities. We investigated associations between early adversity, coping strategies, neuroticism, and adult mental health, cognition, and global brain volumes. Path analysis was applied to behavioural and imaging data from the UK Biobank dataset (N = 472,450, Mdnage = 58, SDage = 8.03, 54.46% of women). All assessed early adverse experiences were associated with greater anxiety symptoms, while all except physical neglect were associated with increased depressive symptoms. Physical neglect was the only adversity associated with poorer cognitive performance, and no adversity showed a direct association with global grey- or white-matter or cerebrospinal fluid volumes. Several indirect pathways were observed: specific coping strategies and neuroticism significantly mediated links between early adversity and adult mental health, cognition, and cerebrospinal fluid volume. These findings are consistent with prior work linking early adversity to adult mental health and brain measures, and highlight coping behaviours and neuroticism as mediating factors. Strengthening adaptive coping may mitigate some detrimental associations, but causal inference is limited by the cross-sectional study design.
Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/
Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.
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Data
Datasets cited
- ukbiobank.ac.uk/
enable-your-research/ , at UK Biobank; found in “Data availability”apply-for-access](https:
Data availability
The data used in this study came from the UK Biobank ( [http://
Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.
Versions
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Version 1, 30 September 2026: the first record
Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 4 authors, 11 keywords, 15 MeSH terms, 4 funders, 37 references.
Cite
This paper
Künzi, M., Gheorghe, D. A., Lian, J., & Bauermeister, S. (2026). Associations between early-life adversity, coping strategies, and adult mental health, brain, and cognition. Scientific reports, 16(1), 12147. https://
BibTeX
@article{kunzi2026associ
author = {Künzi, Morgane and Gheorghe, D A and Lian, J and Bauermeister, S},
title = {{Associations between early-life adversity, coping strategies, and adult mental health, brain, and cognition}},
journal = {Scientific reports},
year = {2026},
month = mar,
volume = {16},
number = {1},
pages = {12147},
publisher = {Nature Publishing Group},
issn = {2045-2322},
doi = {10.1038/
url = {https://
pmid = {41781629},
pmcid = {PMC13076903}
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
AU - Künzi, Morgane
AU - Gheorghe, D A
AU - Lian, J
AU - Bauermeister, S
TI - Associations between early-life adversity, coping strategies, and adult mental health, brain, and cognition
T2 - Scientific reports
J2 - Sci Rep
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/
VL - 16
IS - 1
SP - 12147
SN - 2045-2322
PB - Nature Publishing Group
DO - 10.1038/
UR - https://
LA - en
ER -
CSL-JSON
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