Stroke

This school year, I learned about the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study (Felitti et al., 1998), which examined survey data from a questionnaire and found that both positive and negative childhood experiences have an immense impact on lifelong health. The survey included questions such as: did a parent in the household swear at you, put you down, humiliate you, or act in a way that made you afraid you might be physically hurt?; did you often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special?; did you often feel that your family didn’t look out for each other, feel close to each other, or support each other?; did a household member go to prison?

The survey can be found here.

Based on the answers to the aforementioned questions, responses were tallied and correlated with future health outcomes. Some ACEs have been linked to future negative health outcomes such as alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and even early death. As the number of ACEs increases, so does the risk of negative health outcomes. ACEs were later categorized as an experience related to abuse, an experience related to neglect, or an experience related to household dysfunction. (This is a very brief summation of the study and is in no way exhaustive of the study methodology, results, discussion, etc.)

Since I learned about ACEs, I’ve been extremely interested in how ACEs impact physical and mental health throughout the rest of a child’s life. I am truly intrigued by how an adverse or traumatic experience during childhood can impact physical and cognitive development. While watching the news lately, I couldn’t help but ask myself how child detainment will impact the physical and cognitive development of all the children taken away from their parents. I’m no scholar when it comes to ACEs, but I’d venture to say that a child being detained and taken away from his/her parents is probably one of the most traumatic things he/she could ever experience.

From this perspective, I feel that any approach to solving a country’s myriad of problems that perniciously harms children obviously does more harm than good. In the immediate sense, this is clearly true. But, based on what we know about adverse child experiences and trauma and the lifelong harm they do, this harm will surely be long-lasting and impact these children for the rest of their lives.

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