Early life trauma (ELT) comprises an array of disturbingly common distressing experiences between conception and the beginning of adulthood with numerous and significant potential long-term, even transgenerational, health consequences of great public health concern, including depression, cardiovascular disease, and other psychiatric and medical disorders, and neurobiological, psychological, and behavioral effects which are sufficiently robust to confound many types of biomedical research. The impact of ELT on a woman's health trajectory appears to vary with the specific characteristics of the ELT (e.g., type, number of different types, severity, and timing), the individual (e.g., age, genetics, epigenetics, personality, and cognitive factors), and the individual's environment (e.g., level of social support and ongoing stressors) and to be mediated to a significant extent by persistent changes in a number of biological systems, dysregulation of those governing the stress response chief among them. Growing knowledge of the risk factors and pathophysiological mechanisms by which ELT confers diathesis to various poor health outcomes and the unique treatment-response profiles of women with ELT will lead to much needed improvements in prevention, diagnostic, and therapeutic efforts, including more effective psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy approaches, hopefully making strides toward improvements in the lives of women everywhere and ending countless cycles of intergenerational trauma-associated pathology. This article attempts to broadly summarize the current state of knowledge about the long-term sequelae of ELT for women's health.

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Child abuse and neglect confer substantially increased risks of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for the victims and possibly even their offspring. Furthermore, they are associated with more severe and treatment-resistant PTSD and common comorbid conditions, such as major depressive disorder. This chapter begins by discussing the epidemiology of child abuse, neglect, and maltreatment-associated PTSD to provide a sense of the nature and scope of these major public health problems, then describes the major ways in which child abuse and neglect may contribute to increased liability to PTSD: maltreatment, victim, and environmental factors; neurobiological changes, including neuroendocrine, neurotransmitter system, structural and functional neuroimaging, inflammatory, and epigenetic changes; interactions with risk gene alleles; and cognitive, psychological, and behavioral changes. A discussion of the implications of this knowledge for future research and the development of new treatments for child maltreatment–associated PTSD follows.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a distressing and disabling disease of great public health significance that is often associated with substantial psychiatric and medical comorbidity. It commonly goes unreported and untreated and many cases become chronic in course. Unfortunately, only a minority of patients with chronic PTSD achieves remission. Indeed, it is unusual for patients with PTSD to achieve complete symptom remission after receiving monotherapy with medications or psychotherapy. However, great advances in the prevention and treatment of PTSD have been made in the last quarter century since it was first recognized as a distinct diagnostic entity in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , third edition. This article discusses the current state-of-the-art prevention and treatment interventions for PTSD, including pharmacotherapies, psychotherapies, and nonpharmacological somatic treatments in active duty military personnel and veterans, adult civilians, and children and adolescents. [ Psychiatr Ann . 2016;46(9):533–549.]

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