Relative Importance of Positive and Potentially Traumatic Childhood Experiences in Explaining Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms

In 467 adults with Multiple Sclerosis, specific childhood experiences explained 13.9%–26.0% of symptom-burden variance, with having at least one safe caregiver consistently important.

• Why it matters: Prior work links adverse and positive childhood experiences to later health, but it has rarely tested how these experiences relate to Multiple Sclerosis symptom burden.
• What they did: Adults with MS completed measures of pain, subjective cognitive impairment, cognitive fatigue, depression, TRACEs, and PCEs; an elastic net model compared cumulative effects and individual experiences, using R-squared and variable importance.
• The result: Individual childhood experiences outperformed cumulative TRACEs and PCEs main effects and their interaction, and sudden loss of a loved one showed the strongest explanatory association with subjective cognitive impairment and cognitive fatigue.

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