SynthesisActa psychiatrica Scandinavica2025
A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Association Between Childhood Maltreatment and Adult Depression.
Synthesis in Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Specificity of environmental risk factors for schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, and depressive disorders - umbrella review.Psychological medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Social contact recovery and depressive symptoms after the pandemic lockdowns: the lasting impact of child neglect.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- Measures matter: assessing childhood maltreatment and emotion dysregulation in a transdiagnostic sample.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- An exploratory test of the pathways between adverse childhood experiences and later perpetration of intimate partner violence in South African male youth using theoretical frameworks.Child abuse & neglect · 2026Article
- The relationship between childhood trauma, doomscrolling, and dating violence among university students in Türkiye.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Lifetime stressor exposure, executive functioning, and internalizing symptoms during emerging adulthood.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Role of Adverse Childhood Experiences in the Development of Major Depressive Disorder and Treatment-Resistant Depression.Child psychiatry and human development · 2026Review
- Review
- Factors that inhibit reporting of child maltreatment among dental health personnel - a scoping review.BMC oral health · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionChildhood maltreatment (CM) and depression are serious global issues with high prevalence and lifelong impacts on physical and mental health. CM has been proposed as a modifiable risk factor for depression that, if prevented, may contribute to a reduction in the global incidence of depressive disorders. Despite this, there is a paucity of reviews examining the strength of the association between these variables. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to evaluate the empirical evidence and determine if CM is supported as a preventable risk factor for depression.
methodsA search was performed in July 2024 for all peer-reviewed journal articles written in English examining the relationship between CM and adult depression in the electronic databases EBSCOhost, Proquest, and Embase. Studies were included in this review if they measured maltreatment before 18 years of age as the independent variable and adult depression as the dependent variable. Studies were excluded if the outcome variable was grouped with comorbidity and if they did not report primary quantitative data. A total of 77 studies with 516,302 participants met the inclusion criteria for review.
resultsA random-effects meta-analysis was used to generate a pooled odds ratio from 87 effect estimates and demonstrated that individuals with a history of any CM are 2.5 times more likely to experience adult depression (OR = 2.49 [95% CI: 2.25-2.76]). This increase in odds remained regardless of how the primary studies screened for depression.
conclusionsThese findings confirmed the strong association between the experience of CM and adult depression. High heterogeneity in the meta-analytic results also suggested that further research is required that applies consistent adjustments for comorbidities and confounding factors and examines the temporal relationship between the variables to establish causality.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.