According to a new study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, children who suffer serious trauma during their childhood could be predisposed to developing chronic fatigue syndrome CFS, as adults.

The study from the CDC and Atlanta's Emory University involved 113 CFS patients and 124 people without the disorder living in urban, suburban, or rural Georgia. The researchers found that 62 % of adults with CFS had suffered a childhood trauma as compared to 24 % of the adults who hadn't experienced any trauma. 33 % of CFS patients reported a childhood history of sexual abuse, compared to nearly 11% without CFS and 33% of CFS patients reported being the victims of emotional abuse, compared to 7% of study participants without CFS.

Janet Squires, director of the Child Advocacy Center at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh said, "These early childhood experiences set a pattern. It's eye-opening to see that things that go wrong in childhood might impact people for the rest of their lives."

The study's author, Christine Heim of Emory University School of Medicine, notes that relatively few trauma survivors go on to develop chronic fatigue, which affects about
2.5% of adults. There is research to suggest that chronic fatigue could be caused by an infection or immune system problem, she says.

CFS researcher William Reeves, MD, of the CDC said low cortisol levels may indicate that the body does not respond to stress normally and added that low levels of cortisol were found in the CFS patients who had undergone some childhood trauma but was not seen in CFS patients who had not experienced any childhood trauma. This could mean that childhood trauma could "rewire" the brain in a way that makes people more vulnerable to developing chronic fatigue syndrome in adulthood and help in diagnosis and treatment of the problem.

Harvard Medical School professor and CFS expert Anthony L. Komaroff, FACP, who did not take part in the new study, said, "These researchers are definitely not saying that early-life trauma is the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome," he says. "To say that something is a risk factor is very different from saying that it is the cause."

Komaroff said the findings were not conclusive as 40 % of CFS patients had not undergone any childhood trauma and many who experienced childhood trauma did not develop CFS. "The danger is that people will jump to the conclusion that early-life trauma causes CFS even though this study showed that a large number of people with CFS had no history of trauma," he said. He believed that multiple viruses were triggered in people who were predisposed due to genetics or other reasons. "I don't believe that any single virus is the cause of CFS in the way that HIV is absolutely critical to causing AIDS," he added.

Heim notes that although her study connected trauma and chronic fatigue researchers need to do a "forward-looking" study in which they follow trauma survivors for many years to establish the link.