The variance shared across forms of childhood trauma is strongly associated with liability for psychiatric and substance use disorders.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Forms of childhood trauma tend to co-occur and are associated with increased risk for psychiatric and substance use disorders. Commonly used binary measures of trauma exposure have substantial limitations.

Methods

We performed multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), separately by sex, using data from the Childhood Trauma (CT) Study's sample of twins and siblings (N = 2594) to derive three first-order factors (childhood physical abuse, childhood sexual abuse, and parental partner abuse) and, as hypothesized, one higher order, childhood trauma factor (CTF) representing a measure of their common variance.

Results

CFA produced a good-fitting model in the CT Study; we replicated the model in the Comorbidity and Trauma (CAT) Study's sample (N = 1981) of

SUBMITTER: Kristjansson S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4720689 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature