Professor Tim Spector

So if you look at all these brain diseases, virtually all of them, if you go back in time, if you've had emotional, physical, sexual trauma...

in early life, you're much more likely to have brain diseases later in life.

And this is across all of them.

Again, coming up with the idea that they're all related in some way.

And so we've moved on from the Freudian idea that, you know,

The mind is different from the brain if you take this holistic idea.

How does this fit into this inflammatory metabolic theory of brain health?

I think it now does because they've done studies showing that following trauma or stress, you can trigger your immune system to be permanently raised.

So, again, you get this consistent stress that the thermostat doesn't go down to baseline.

So you have a period of a year, a terrible period as a kid.

They do tests later in life.

They'll find your inflammation levels in your blood are raised from people who had a nice, gentle, quiet childhood.

And I think this is...

starts to link all these different components together.

And these cross all these early life traumas.

You see the same thing in people with chronic pain, chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome.

epilepsy, schizophrenia, everything.

But it doesn't really matter where the source of the stress was.

It's caused some physiological problem.

So I think that is really interesting so that we could pick up people who, if we had better tests of that stress and inflammation, we could start to