Epigenomic Susceptibility to the Social World: Plausible Paths to a “Newest Morbidity”

Abstract

This article—presented on the celebratory occasion of Dr Robert Haggerty's 91st birthday—describes how a 1962 article by Dr Haggerty and his colleague Dr Roger Meyer launched a previously unexplored, pediatric research enterprise by asserting that: “There are little precise data to explain why one person becomes ill with an infecting agent and another not.” Noting a prospective association between family stressors and the acquisition of β-hemolytic streptococcal infections, the article introduced a generation of young academic pediatricians—the author of the present article among them—to the possibility of causal linkages among children's adversity exposures, compromised immunological processes, and the development of immune-mediated, acute or chronic diseases of childhood. That research agenda has led, over the past 40 years, to the advent of psychoneuroimmunology as a field of study, to the recognition of childhood stress and adversity as potential etiologic agents among childhood morbidities, and to the discovery of differential susceptibility to social adversities within populations of children.