Terrie Moffitt

Duke University | DU · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

INTRODUCTION The geroscience hypothesis proposes systemic biological aging is a root cause of cognitive decline. METHODS We analyzed Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort data (n = 2296; 46% male; baseline age M = 62, SD = 9, range = 25–101 y). We measured cognitive decline across two decades of neuropsychological‐testing follow‐up. We measured...

Background Mental disorders and physical-health conditions frequently co-occur, impacting treatment outcomes. While most prior research has focused on single pairs of mental disorders and physical-health conditions, this study explores broader associations between multiple mental disorders and physical-health conditions. Methods Using the Norwegia...

Background Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with mental health problems, but many children who experience ACEs do not develop such difficulties. A warm and supportive adult presence in childhood is associated with a lower likelihood of developing mental health problems after exposure to ACEs. However, it is unclear whether this a...

Epigenetic measures of aging derived from DNA methylation are promising biomarkers associated with prospective morbidity and mortality, but require validation in real-world medical settings. Using data from 2,216 post-9/11 veterans, we examined whether accelerated DunedinPACE aging scores were associated with chronic disease morbidity, predicted he...

Background: Lower parental income is associated with more psychiatric disorders among offspring, but it is unclear if this association reflects effects of parental income (social causation) or shared risk factors (social selection). Prior research finds contradictory results, which may be due to age differences between the studied offspring. Method...

How many primary-care encounters are devoted to mental-health conditions compared with physical-health conditions? Here we analyzed Norway’s nationwide administrative primary-care records, extracting all doctor–patient encounters occurring during 14 years (2006–2019) for the population aged 0–100 years. Encounters were recorded according to the Int...

We evaluated the developmental epidemiology of midlife-onset alcohol dependence (AD) in the Dunedin Study ( N = 1,037), a population-representative cohort followed across 5 decades. At ages 18, 21, 26, 32, 38, and 45, past-year AD prevalence was 11.0%, 18.4%, 13.6%, 8.1%, 9.6%, and 11.3%, respectively. As expected, relative to never-diagnosed indiv...

Failures of self-control can manifest as externalizing behaviors (e.g., aggression, rule-breaking) that have far-reaching negative consequences. Researchers have long been interested in measuring children’s genetic risk for externalizing behaviors to inform efforts at early identification and intervention. Drawing on data from the Environmental Ris...

To understand how aging affects functional decline and increases disease risk, it is necessary to develop accurate and reliable measures of how fast a person is aging. Epigenetic clocks measure aging but require DNA methylation data, which many studies lack. Using data from the Dunedin Study, we introduce an accurate and reliable measure for the ra...

Objectives Tests of physical function are often thought to measure functioning that is (1) musculoskeletal, and (2) newly declining in adult life. In contrast, this study aimed to: (1) add to evidence that physical-function tests also measure brain function, and (2) test the novel hypothesis that adult physical function is associated with brain fun...

Importance Low childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is a social hallmark of aging that contributes to adult health disparities and earlier morbidity and mortality. Childhood perceptions of stress are associated with child health outcomes and may contribute to premature biological aging into adulthood. Objective To describe the association of child...

Millions of adults and children are exposed to high levels of lead, a neurotoxicant, each year. Recent evidence suggests that lead exposure may precipitate neurodegeneration, particularly if the exposure occurs early or late in life, with unique alterations to the structure or function of specific subfields of the hippocampus, a region involved in...

As disasters increase due to climate change, population density, epidemics, and technology, information is needed about postdisaster consequences for people’s mental health and how stress-related mental disorders affect multiple spheres of life, including labor-market attachment. We tested the causal hypothesis that individuals who developed stress...

Objectives The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study provides a unique opportunity to document the progression of ear health and hearing ability within the same cohort of individuals from birth. This investigation draws on hearing data from 5 to 13 years and again at 45 years of age, to explore the associations between childhood he...

Introduction: The geroscience hypothesis proposes systemic biological aging is a root cause of cognitive decline. Methods: We analyzed Framingham Heart Study Offspring Cohort data (n=2,296; 46% male; baseline age M=62, SD=9, range=25-101y). We measured cognitive decline across two decades of neuropsychological-testing follow-up. We measured pace of...

Infections, which can prompt neuroinflammation, may be a risk factor for dementia1–5. More information is needed concerning associations across different infections and different dementias, and from longitudinal studies with long follow-ups. This New Zealand-based population register study tested whether infections antedate dementia across three de...

As societies age, policy makers need tools to understand how demographic aging will affect population health and to develop programs to increase healthspan. The current metrics used for policy analysis do not distinguish differences caused by early-life factors, such as prenatal care and nutrition, from those caused by ongoing changes in peoples bo...

INTRODUCTION Dementia risk may be elevated in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Reasons for this remain unclear, and this elevation has yet to be shown at a national population level. METHODS We tested whether dementia was more prevalent in disadvantaged neighborhoods across the New Zealand population (N = 1.41 million analytic sample...

Importance People who complete more education live longer lives with better health. New evidence suggests that these benefits operate through a slowed pace of biological aging. If so, measurements of the pace of biological aging could offer intermediate end points for studies of how interventions to promote education will affect healthy longevity....

Perceptions of crime detection risk (e.g., risk of arrest) play an integral role in the criminal decision-making process. Yet, the sources of variation in those perceptions are not well understood. Do individuals respond to changes in legal policy or is perception of detection risk shaped like other perceptions—by experience, heuristics, and with b...

Objective: People who eat healthier diets are less likely to develop dementia, but the biological mechanism of this protection is not well understood. We tested the hypothesis that healthy diet protects against dementia because it slows the pace of biological aging. Methods: We analyzed Framingham Offspring Cohort data. We included participants ≥6...

Adversity that exhibits continuity across the life course has long-term detrimental effects on physical and mental health. Using 920 participants from the Dunedin Study, we tested the following hypotheses: (a) Children (ages 3–15) who experienced adversity would also tend to experience adversity in adulthood (ages 32–45), and (2) interim personalit...

People who experience trauma and develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are at increased risk for poor health. One mechanism that could explain this risk is accelerated biological aging, which is associated with the accumulation of chronic diseases, disability, and premature mortality. Using data from 2309 post-9/11 United States military vet...

Stress and stressful events are associated with poorer health. There are multiple approaches to measure stress—from assessing subjective perceptions of stress to assessing the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—and multiple periods that can be assessed across the lifespan. How might stress result in poorer health? One plausible phy...

Midlife is a pivotal period in the life course in terms of investing resources to mitigate challenges that can come in older age. It is important to understand the relationship between childhood and midlife health, as it could have predictive properties for aging. We investigated the association between early childhood brain health and midlife phys...

Several decades of empirical research has shown that people who experience relationship dissolution—such as romantic breakups, divorce, and bereavement—have increased risk for poor health across a range of disease outcomes. However, it remains less clear which physiological pathways might best explain links between relationship dissolution and late...

Importance: People who complete more education live longer lives with better health. New evidence suggests that these benefits operate through a slowed pace of biological aging. If so, measurements of the pace biological aging could offer intermediate endpoints for studies of how interventions to promote education will impact healthy longevity. Obj...

Objectives Childhood caries is associated with poorer self‐rated general health in adulthood, but it remains unclear whether that holds for physical health and aging. The aim of this study was to identify whether age‐5 caries is associated with (a) biomarkers for poor physical health, and (b) the pace of aging (PoA) by age 45 years. Methods Partic...

Mapping individual differences in brain function has been hampered by poor reliability as well as limited interpretability. Leveraging patterns of brain‐wide functional connectivity (FC) offers some promise in this endeavor. In particular, a macroscale principal FC gradient that recapitulates a hierarchical organization spanning molecular, cellular...

Biological aging is the correlated decline of multi-organ system integrity central to the etiology of many age-related diseases. A novel epigenetic measure of biological aging, DunedinPACE, is associated with cognitive dysfunction, incident dementia, and mortality. Here, we tested for associations between DunedinPACE and structural MRI phenotypes i...

Importance: Few studies have estimated the lifetime incidence of mental health disorders and the association with socioeconomic functioning. Objective: To investigate whether the lifetime incidence of treated mental health disorders is substantially higher than previously reported and estimate associations with long-term socioeconomic difficulti...

Genetic inheritance is not the only way parents’ genes may affect children. It is also possible that parents’ genes are associated with investments into children’s development. We examined evidence for links between parental genetics and parental investments, from the prenatal period through to adulthood, using data from six population-based cohort...

What are the major sources of worldwide variability in subjective well-being (SWB)? Twin and family studies of SWB have found substantial heritability and strong effects from unique environments but virtually no effects from shared environments. However, extant findings are not necessarily valid at the global level. Prior studies have examined with...

Behaviors and disorders characterized by difficulties with self-regulation, such as problematic substance use, antisocial behavior, and symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), incur high costs for individuals, families, and communities. These externalizing behaviors often appear early in the life course and can have far-reachin...

INTRODUCTION: We tested the hypothesis that healthy diet protects against dementia because it slows the pace of biological aging. METHODS: We analyzed Framingham Offspring Cohort data (≥60y). We measured healthy diet using the Dietary Guideline for Americans (DGA, 3 visits 1991-2008), pace of aging using the DunedinPACE epigenetic clock (2005-2008)...

Background. Midlife adults are experiencing a crisis of deaths of despair (i.e. deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease). We tested the hypothesis that a syndrome of despair-related maladies at midlife is preceded by psychopathology during adolescence. Methods. Participants are members of a representative cohort of 10...

Over the past 10 years, the general factor of psychopathology, p, has attracted interest and scrutiny. We review the history of the idea that all mental disorders share something in common, p; how we arrived at this idea; and how it became conflated with a statistical representation, the bifactor model. We then leverage data from the Environmental...

Background The field of epigenomics holds great promise in understanding and treating disease with advances in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence being vitally important in this pursuit. Increasingly, research now utilises DNA methylation measures at cytosine–guanine dinucleotides (CpG) to detect disease and estimate biological trait...

Study objectives: Digital technology use is associated with poor sleep quality in adolescence and young adulthood although research findings have been mixed. No studies have addressed the association between the two using a genetically informative twin design which could extend our understanding of the etiology of this relationship. This study aim...

Objectives: Individuals with more education are at lower risk of developing multiple, different age-related diseases than their less educated peers. A reason for this might be that individuals with more education age slower. There are two complications in testing this hypothesis. First, there exists no definitive measure of biological aging. Secon...

Objective: Stress and stressful events are associated with poorer health, however, there are multiple ways to conceptualize and measure stress and stress responses. One physiological mechanism through which stress could result in poorer health is accelerated biological aging. This study tested which types of stress were associated with accelerated...

Although higher-order cognitive and lower-order sensorimotor abilities are generally regarded as distinct and studied separately, there is evidence that they not only covary but also that this covariation increases across the lifespan. This pattern has been leveraged in clinical settings where a simple assessment of sensory or motor ability (e.g. h...

Background and hypothesis: Children exposed to socioenvironmental adversities (eg, urbanicity, pollution, neighborhood deprivation, crime, and family disadvantage) are more likely to subsequently develop subclinical psychotic experiences during adolescence (eg, hearing voices, paranoia). However, the pathways through which this occurs have not bee...

Four related lines of research on anxiety were reviewed from the 'Dunedin Study', an investigation of a representative longitudinal birth cohort of 50-years duration, with 94% retention at the last follow-up. Findings include: (i) Childhood fears deemed evolutionarily-relevant may have different pathways and/or mechanisms underlying their emergence...

Purpose: The retina has potential as a biomarker of brain health and Alzheimer's disease (AD) because it is the only part of the central nervous system which can be easily imaged and has advantages over brain imaging technologies. Few studies have compared retinal and brain measurements in a middle-aged sample. The objective of our study was to in...

Background A joint, hierarchical structure of psychopathology and personality has been reported in adults but should also be investigated at earlier ages, as psychopathology often develops before adulthood. Here, we investigate the joint factor structure of psychopathology and personality in eight-year-old children, estimate factor heritability and...

Although higher-order cognitive and lower-order sensorimotor abilities are generally regarded as distinct and studied separately, there is evidence that they not only covary but also that this covariation increases across the lifespan. This pattern has been leveraged in clinical settings where a simple assessment of sensory or motor ability (e.g.,...

The aim of this study was to use longitudinal population-based data to examine the associations between childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and risk for adverse outcomes in multiple life domains across adulthood. In 937 individuals followed from birth to age 45y, we assessed associations between CSA (retrospectively reported at age 26y) and the experience...

Purpose Social isolation has been shown to have negative effects on mental health outcomes though little is known about trajectories across the life course. We examined the relationship between trajectory groups and selected mental health outcomes in mid-adulthood. Methods We previously created a typology of social isolation based on onset during...

Prior research shows that individuals who have exhibited antisocial behavior are in poorer health than their same-aged peers. A major driver of poor health is aging itself, yet research has not investigated relationships between offending trajectories and biological aging. We tested the hypothesis that individuals following a life-course persistent...

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by psychological and physiological manifestations contributing to the disease severity and outcome. In recent years, several lines of evidence have suggested that individuals with MDD have an elevated risk of age-related adverse outcomes across the lifespan. This review provided evidence of a signifi...

Background: Despite its introduction into the diagnostic nomenclature over four decades ago, there remain large knowledge gaps about disordered gambling. The primary aims of the present study were to document the long-term course, childhood precursors, and adult life outcomes associated with disordered gambling. Methods: Participants enrolled in...

Knowledge of a person’s risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs) is required to triage candidates for preventive interventions, surveillance, and treatment trials. ADRD risk indexes exist for this purpose, but each includes only a subset of known risk factors. Information missing from published indexes could improve risk predictio...

Background Cannabis is often characterised as a young person's drug. However, people who began consuming cannabis in the 1970s and 1980s are no longer young and some have consumed it for many years. This study tested the preregistered hypothesis that long-term cannabis users show accelerated biological ageing in midlife and poorer health preparedne...

Introduction Understanding normative patterns of change in kidney function over the life course may allow targeting of early interventions to slow or prevent the onset of kidney disease, but knowledge about kidney functional change prior to middle age is limited. This study used prospective longitudinal data from a representative birth cohort to ex...

Despite the substantial heritability of antisocial behavior (ASB), specific genetic variants robustly associated with the trait have not been identified. The present study by the Broad Antisocial Behavior Consortium (BroadABC) meta-analyzed data from 28 discovery samples (N = 85,359) and five independent replication samples (N = 8058) with genotypi...

Prior research shows that individuals who have exhibited antisocial behavior are in poorer health than their same-aged peers. A major driver of poor health is aging itself, yet research has not investigated relationships between offending trajectories and biological aging. We tested the hypothesis that individuals following a life-course persistent...

Large-scale volunteer databanks (LSVD) have emerged from the recognized value of cohorts, attracting substantial funding and promising great scientific value. A major focus is their size, with the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that large size (thus power) creates generalizability. We contend that this is open to challenge. In the conte...

Despite the substantial heritability of antisocial behavior (ASB), specific genetic variants robustly associated with the trait have not been identified. The present study by the Broad Antisocial Behavior Consortium (BroadABC) meta-analyzed data from 28 discovery samples (N = 85,359) and five independent replication samples (N = 8,058) with genotyp...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with poorer health, which has spurred public health efforts to reduce the number of adverse events children experience. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that all ACEs can be prevented. For adults who already experienced ACEs in childhood, what psychological, social, and behavioral intervention target...

Over the last 50 years Dunedin Study researchers have published more than 1400 peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and reports on many aspects of human health and development. In this 50th anniversary piece we reflect on (i) our historical roots and necessary re-invention through time; (ii) the underpinning principles that have contributed to ou...

We investigated the extent to which measures of retinal neuronal thickness capture variability in the structural integrity of the brain in a large population-based cohort followed from birth to midlife. Using data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (n=1037; analytic n=828, aged 45 years), we specifically tested for asso...

Purpose Violence occurs at multiple ecological levels and can harm mental health. However, studies of adolescents’ experience of violence have often ignored the community context of violence, and vice versa. We examined how personal experience of severe physical violence and living in areas with high levels of neighbourhood disorder during adolesce...

Background and objectives: DNA methylation algorithms are increasingly used to estimate biological aging; however, how these proposed measures of whole-organism biological aging relate to aging in the brain is not known. We used data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) Offspring Cohort t...

Background: Chaotic home environments may contribute to children's attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms. However, ADHD genetic risk may also influence household chaos. This study investigated whether children in chaotic households had more ADHD symptoms, if mothers and children with higher ADHD genetic risk lived in more chaoti...

Background Cannabis legalization and use are outpacing our understanding of its long-term effects on brain and behavior, which is fundamental for effective policy and health practices. Existing studies are limited by small samples, cross-sectional measures, failure to separate long-term from recreational use, and inadequate control for other substa...

Background: Trajectories of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) traits spanning early childhood to mid-life have not been described in general populations across different geographical contexts. Population trajectories are crucial to better understanding typical developmental patterns. Methods: We combined repeated assessments of ADH...

The field of epigenomics holds great promise in understanding and treating disease with advances in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence being vitally important in this pursuit. Increasingly, research now utilises DNA methylation measures at cytosine-guanine dinucleotides (CpG) to detect disease and estimate biological traits such as a...