Adverse childhood experiences

So we know that trauma is connected to dis-ease in the body.

And I think the biggest trial or biggest study that showed this was the ACE study, the Adverse Childhood Events study that was done, looked at thousands of children.

And quantified the number of adverse events.

So these could be traumatic events like divorce of a parent or a parent who's incarcerated or physical abuse or sexual abuse or neglect or having a parent that is addicted to drugs.

And it counted those adverse childhood events that the children had, and then it followed them into adulthood.

And it saw it or it showed that the higher the ACE score, the higher the likelihood of these children developing conditions such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease.

cancer, mental health problems, addictions.

And even when you controlled for, you know, the addictions or the mental health concerns or conditions that arose for these children, which those are things that we would just expect, they still had a higher risk of illness in adulthood than children who had lower ACE scores or no adverse childhood events.

We put a lot of effort and a lot of money into schools, early childhood, child care programs.

And what I found is once people are aware of the ACEs study, then they feel compelled to make changes.

And so I think that is really fitting for the journey that I've had in my career, but also how kind of the social services and also health care have kind of adjusted as the data is coming out about the impact of childhood trauma and also just the overall data that's associated with stress and trauma in general.

you're all going in this direction of becoming trauma informed.

I have hope because.

I have hope because science is finally catching up with lived experience.

So one of the things that I appreciated about the ACEs study is that it was catching up with lived experience.

Like, okay, people who are experiencing racism have poor health outcomes and they have, you know, all of the gamut of symptoms and disparities.

The way I found your study was good old Google.

I was doing a Google search about ACEs.

What is that? Adverse Childhood.

Experiences.

I had a question about what makes criminals.

And then from there on, I worked with my mentor at the University of Louisville, and he did some studies around that too before.

And so we just threw some ideas around and started thinking about ACEs, adverse childhood experiences.

How does that play into later life criminality? I thought that everything would have a positive impact, like neglect or physical abuse.

The Adverse Childhood Events Score is actually a model of assessment based on a questionnaire of 10 different things that you're exposed to before the age of 18.

And the more yeses you have, the higher incidence you will to have a chronic illness or a cancer at a very young age.

So when we start to hit four out of 10, we start to see exponential increases in things like cancer in young people.

Number two, I mentioned my sort of mental health or my ideology and my sort of lack of life, the desire to live.

I came from a very toxic, traumatic upbringing.

So for folks who know, and maybe your community knows this, but the Adverse Childhood Events Score is actually a model of assessment based on a questionnaire of 10 different things that you're exposed to before the age of 18.

And the more yeses you have, the higher incidence you will to have a chronic illness or a cancer at a very young age.

So when we start to hit four out of 10, we start to see exponential increases in things like cancer in young people.

Absolutely.

If you look at adverse childhood circumstances, right? I'm working on the, uh, ACEs, what we call the ACEs-

Yeah.

Yeah

I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on Long-Term Impacts of Childhood Exper- Ad- Adverse Childhood Experiences and Trauma.

I'm your host, Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes.

Childhood trauma and ACEs fundamentally alter each piece of a child's life, and we're gonna go through those today and explore how those alterations in each piece of a child's life can contribute to mental as well as physical illness and other problems later in life, as well as strategies we can use to assist people in, um, recovering and healing from these traumas.

We're going to explore the relationship between ACEs, that's adverse childhood experiences, trauma, and attachment trauma.

We'll identify the impact of ACEs and traumatic injury on all pieces of life and explore risk factors for ACEs and subsequent prevention and inter- intervention measures.

Let's start out at the beginning, the very basics.

What is trauma? And I use a s- few different nuances.

We're talking about childhood experiences that were traumatic to the child that were never healed or didn't heal appropriately.

And so there was a kind of, um, ongoing healing from the, the traumas as they were happening.

But if you listen to Jake Clark from Save a Warrior and some other people talking about the prevalence in uniform, you know, the ACEs, the Adverse Childhood Experience score, most of us are on average about a 6 out of 10, and most incarcerated men and women are a- about a 6 out of 10.

Hmm.

So goes to show that y- we all kind of start on the same path of, of those two groups, and then depending on the mentors that you have in your life, you either turned into a better direction or you end up in a gang or dead or, you know, whatever the other side is.

Joining me today is Dr. Stefan Kurpakvinsky, is a postdoctoral fellow in which he hopes to further investigate longitudinal parent-child development among sexual and gender minority parents and their children.

Today, we're going to be discussing adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, what they are, how they may echo across generations, and what that means for the health and development of children today.

Adverse childhood experiences are far more common than most people realize.

And their effects can ripple forward for decades and even across generations.

With 60% of individuals worldwide have reporting experiencing at least one ACE and one in six reporting exposure to four or more ACEs.

Let's dive in.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

So there was 10 items that was originally published by Felitti et al.