Adverse Childhood Experiences

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are stressful or traumatic events experienced during childhood that have a strong, graded relationship with life-long negative health outcomes. What’s graded relationship you ask? Well that means that for each additional ACE one accumulates more risk like taking another dose. For example, if one ACE increases your risk by 10% then two ACEs might increase your risk by 20%, and three by 30%.

The most commonly identified ACEs are:

• physical abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, parental loss through divorce, death or abandonment, parental imprisonment, parental mental illness, parental substance abuse, or violence against their mother figure.

But these are not the only ACEs, research continues to identify more such as: 

• childhood bullying, peer victimization, isolation, peer rejection, and poverty.

The higher one’s ACE score (experiencing multiple categories of ACE exposure) the higher the likelihood of having multiple health risk factors later in life. For example, experiencing four or more ACEs increases one’s risk of:

• obesity 1.9 X the risk
• sleep disturbance 2.2 X the risk
• anxiety 3.6 X the risk
• impaired cognitive function X 4.4 the risk
• depression 4.6 X the risk
• substance use 4–12 X the risk

This relationship to increased risk factors has been confirmed across a broad spectrum of the human experience including:

• poor mental health: panic reactions, depression, anxiety, hallucinations, and sleep disturbances
• adult diseases: diabetes, asthma, stroke, myocardial infarction, cancer, skeletal fractures, liver disease, sexually transmitted infections, adiposity, obesity, and all-cause mortality
• potentially harmful behaviours: physical inactivity, substance use, addictions, promiscuity, self-harm, suicide, early sexual intercourse, poor anger control, and perpetuating intimate partner violence.

From our brain and nervous system to our stress response, immune, and endogenous opioid systems to our attachment and defence systems to our very cell strucures these underlying and interconnected biological systems help us adapt and survive in our environments. Because many of these protective systems are immature at birth, their function and development are heavily influenced by the environment with which they interact. When these systems function appropriately, they are highly adaptive to protect us. However, given their malleable nature, particularly in childhood, their protective function can become disorganized, impaired, or over-activated resulting in a lifetime of potentially problematic outcomes. For example, the stress response system produces high levels of cortisol to increases blood sugar availability to provide the energy needed to meet the percieved threat but when this system becomes chronically activated the higher blood sugar levels increase risk of developing obesity and diabetes.

Whether directly or indirectly, ACEs impact us all.

 

“Because many of these protective systems are immature at birth, their function and development are heavily influenced by the environment with which they interact. When these systems function appropriately, they are highly adaptive to protect us. However, given their malleable nature, particularly in childhood, their protective function can become disorganized, impaired, or over-activated resulting in a lifetime of potentially problematic outcomes..”