Associations between early-life adversity, coping strategies, and adult mental health, brain, and cognition

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, Mdn_age = 58, SD_age = 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.