Adverse Childhood Experiences

     Today I stumbled across a website called acestoohigh.com.  It is about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their effects on the human body/mind.  It was interesting to note that according to their survey of 17,000 participants, 64% had at least one indicator of ACE.  There is a ten question survey that calculates your ACE score (located here) that asks basic questions about how you perceive your childhood.

     ACEs are things such as experiencing physical, mental, sexual, or emotional abuse; having a family member with a drug or alcohol problem; witnessing your mother figure being victim of abuse; and many others.  The survey only focused on ten such ACEs. 

     For the study, they also conducted a basic physical exam and administered a more in depth questionnaire about past and current behavioural patterns.  If you are interested in these questions, they are located as PDF files here.

     From this they determined the correlations between ACE scores and certain health factors.  They found a strong connection between a person’s ACE score and health issues including not only drug and alcohol use, depression, smoking, but also cancer, COPD, and chronic bronchitis.  This may come as no surprise to many, but I found it very interesting that childhood stress has a link to adult physical health.

--JJM