New baboon study shows stressful upbringing can shorten life, but strong social ties can help regain those years

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But mounting evidence suggests that building strong social relationships can help mitigate these effects. And not just for people, but also for our primate cousins.

Drawing on 36 years of data, a new study of nearly 200 baboons in southern Kenya finds that adversity early in life can take years off their lives, but strong social ties with other baboons in adulthood can help retrieve them.

“It’s like the King James Apocrypha saying, ‘A faithful friend is the medicine of life,'” said lead author Susan Alberts, a professor of evolutionary biology and anthropology at Duke University.

Baboons who had challenging childhoods were able to regain two years of life expectancy by forming strong friendships.

The findings appear May 17 in the journal Progress of science.

Research has consistently found that those who go through more bad experiences growing up (things like abuse, neglect, a mentally ill parent) are more likely to face an early grave in the future. But figuring out how one leads to the other has been harder to do.

While the downsides of harsh parenting are well documented, “the underlying mechanisms have been harder to pin down,” Alberts said.

One limitation of previous research was the reliance on past memories that people reported about their past, which can be subjective and imprecise.

Alberts said that’s where long-term research on wild primates, which share more than 90% of our DNA, comes in. Since 1971, researchers have followed individual baboons near Amboseli National Park in Kenya on an almost daily basis, observing which animals they socialized with and how they fared throughout their lives as part of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to know: How does adversity early in life ultimately lead to premature death, even years later?

One hypothesis is that trauma survivors often grow up to have problematic relationships as adults, and the resulting lack of social support, in turn, is what shortens their lives. But the new findings paint a different picture of the causal pathway involved in baboons and offer some hope.

In the study, the researchers looked at how early life experiences and adult social connections affected long-term survival in 199 female baboons that were closely monitored in Amboseli between 1983 and 2019.

Baboons don’t grow up in broken or dysfunctional homes per se, but they are no strangers to hardship. For each woman, the team counted her exposure to six potential sources of early adversity. They looked at whether she had a low-ranking or socially isolated mother, or whether her mother died before she reached maturity. They also noted if she was born in a drought year, if she was born in a large group, or if she had a sibling of a similar age, which could mean more competition for resources or maternal attention.

The results show that for baboons growing up in the semi-arid and unpredictable landscape of Amboseli, stressful experiences are common. Of the baboons in the study, 75% suffered at least one stressor and 33% two or more.

The analyzes also confirmed previous findings that the higher a woman’s hardship count, the shorter her lifespan. But this wasn’t just because baboons that experienced more disturbances early in life were more socially isolated in adulthood, and they were, Alberts said.

Rather, the researchers were able to show that 90% of the drop in survival was due to the direct effects of early adversity, and not to the weakened social bonds they inevitably experience in adulthood.

The effects add up. Each additional hardship translated into 1.4 years of life lost, no matter how strong or weak their ties to other baboons. Baboons that had four bad experiences growing up died almost 5.6 years earlier than those that had none, a big drop given that the average female baboon only lives to be around 18 years old.

But this does not mean that baboons with an unfortunate start in life are doomed to a life cut short.

“Women who have bad early lives are not doomed,” said first author Elizabeth Lange, an assistant professor at SUNY Oswego.

far from there The researchers also found that the baboons that formed the strongest social bonds, as measured by how often they groomed themselves with their closest friends, added 2.2 years to their lives, no matter what they faced when they were younger. .

Baboons whose mothers died before they reached maturity, but later forged strong friendships as adults, were the most able to recover.

The flip side is also true, Alberts said. “Strong social ties can mitigate the effects of early life adversity, but conversely, weak social ties can magnify them.”

The researchers cannot yet say if the results are generalizable to humans. But if so, the researchers say, it suggests that early intervention is not the only effective way to overcome the effects of childhood trauma.

“We found that both early life adversity and adult social interactions affect survival independently,” Lange said. “That means that interventions that occur throughout life could improve survival.”

In other words, focusing on adults, particularly their ability to build and maintain relationships, can also help.

“If you had adversity early in life, whatever you do, try to make friends,” Alberts said.

This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (R01AG053308, P01AG031719, R01AG053330, R01AG071684, R01HD088558, and R01AG075914) and from the National Science Foundation (1456832).