Disrupting Pathways from Early Adversity to Adult Substance Abuse: Identifying Education Resilience Factors in Diverse Groups

最近的纵向研究表明，公认的成人健康预测指标实际上可能是 促进健康和易受伤害的因素出现在生命早期。如果是真的，这就强调了有必要确定 对成人健康和健康行为有深远影响的童年经历和状况。 广泛的研究已经证明了教育和药物使用问题之间的联系，但到目前为止 对潜在的因果机制的了解有限。一些流行病学家推测， 教育-物质使用关联可能是由未被观察到的早期生活因素驱动的，例如童年认知 技能。与此直接相关的是，来自神经科学的越来越多的证据表明，儿童的认知、行为 儿童早期的逆境和“有毒压力”可能会对社会情绪的发展产生深远的影响。 对孩子的在校经历、教育成就和 生命过程健康，包括远端物质使用结果。根据这项研究的含义， 目前的研究建议研究从儿童早期的逆境到教育和 青壮年的物质使用结果。重要的是，该项目还旨在确定教育韧性 从儿童早期到青春期晚期可以减轻或破坏儿童早期影响的因素 关于药物滥用的逆境。鉴于现有的教育不平等，长期压力中的种族/民族差异 和累积劣势，以及成人药物使用问题上的差异，拟议的研究将进一步 调查儿童早期逆境后果和保护效果的种族/民族差异 教育韧性因素。该项目需要对两个正在进行的国家数据进行二次分析 纵向调查，美国全国青少年及其母亲纵向调查 1979年美国国家青年纵向调查的队列。它们共同提供了异常丰富的“子级”数据 从出生到成年，与历史和当前的母体数据相联系，包括观察性的 关于家庭环境的数据，以及关于儿童随时间推移的教育的多个角度。这项研究具有指导性 通过综合概念模型，了解儿童发展、教育(特别是 幼儿教育)和物质使用流行病学，由一个多学科小组从 公共卫生、教育、发展心理学、社会学和生物统计学领域。这项研究适用于 创新和最先进的统计技术，如多组交叉滞后路径/结构方程 互惠效应的建模，以及检验因果缓和的倾向计分方法。这项研究将使 对导致物质使用差异出现的生命周期机制的新认识，并将确定 不同发展阶段的可塑性、与教育相关的因素，有助于促进韧性和 减少早期逆境对不同群体的有害影响。

Recent longitudinal studies suggest that well-established, adult predictors of health might actually be proxies for health-promoting and vulnerability factors present early in life. If true, this underscores the need to identify childhood experiences and conditions that have far-reaching effects on adult health and health behavior. Extensive research has demonstrated the link between education and substance use problems, but to date has provided limited understanding of underlying causal mechanisms. Some epidemiologists speculate that the education-substance use association may be driven by unobserved, early life factors such as childhood cognitive skills. Directly relevant to this, growing evidence from neuroscience suggests that children’s cognitive, behavioral and socioemotional development may be profoundly impacted by early childhood adversity and “toxic stress” – with potentially significant consequences for a child’s school experiences, educational achievement and lifecourse health, including distal substance use outcomes. Following on the implications of this research, the current study proposes to examine longitudinal pathways from early childhood adversity to educational and substance use outcomes in young adulthood. Importantly, the project also aims to identify education resilience factors from early childhood through late adolescence that can mitigate or disrupt the effects of early childhood adversity on substance abuse. Given existing educational inequalities, racial/ethnic differences in chronic stress and cumulative disadvantage, and disparities in adult substance use problems, the proposed study will further investigate racial/ethnic differences in the consequences of early childhood adversity and in the protective effects of education resilience factors. This project will entail secondary analysis of data from two ongoing national longitudinal surveys, the Children of the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and their mothers from the 1979 cohort of the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Together, they provide unusually rich, “child” data from birth through young adulthood, linked with historical and current maternal data, and including observational data on the home environment, and multiple perspectives on children’s schooling over time. The study is guided by an integrative conceptual model informed by recent advances in child development, education (particularly early childhood education), and substance use epidemiology, and is conducted by a multidisciplinary team from the fields of public health, education, developmental psychology, sociology, and biostatistics. The study applies innovative and state-of-the-art statistical techniques such as multi-group cross-lagged path/structural equation modeling for reciprocal effects, and propensity score methods to test causal moderation. This research will shed new light on lifecourse mechanisms leading to the emergence of substance use disparities, and will identify malleable, education-related factors in different developmental periods that help to promote resilience and reduce the harmful effects of early adversity in diverse groups.