April 20, 2006 -- Researchers Look for Roots of Resilience in Children

The field is in its infancy and much work remains to be done, but investigators said at a New York Academy of Sciences conference in February that they are now examining the environmental or genetic characteristics that enable some children to survive adversity more successfully than others. The study of resilience itself is not new, but research over the past several years has just begun to look at some of the behavioral-psychosocial and neurobiological aspects of resilience in the hope of finding clues for prevention and intervention, said conference keynoter Dr. Michael Rutter, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London. And one obvious place to look for differences among individuals is at the genetic level, noted Dr. Thomas Insel of the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. "The genome is all about individual variation, and there’s a whole book to be read there," Insel said. Dr. Rutter pointed out, however, that studies up to now have shown that genetic variants don’t by themselves account for children’s ability or inability to weather chronic illness or maltreatment—circumstances in the child’s environment appear to trigger the genetic tendencies. "The genetic variant is neither a risk factor nor a protective factor in itself," Rutter said. Right now, researchers are looking for clues to rhesus monkeys raised in the laboratory, where some are fearful and anxious while others are impulsive and aggressive. The same things may be true even within one human family, making the search for origins of a complex trait such as resilience extremely complicated, they said. The news item "Researchers Seek Roots of Resilience in Children" appears in the April 19 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.