One in six Californians has experienced severe childhood trauma, which is strongly linked to serious health problems in adulthood, according to a new study released today by the Center for Youth Wellness, a San Francisco health organization, and the Public Health Institute, an Oakland-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting health.
Researchers analyzed years of the state’s public health data in 28,000 people to provide a snapshot of the impact that Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, has on California and its residents. The picture isn’t pretty.
“The findings clearly illustrate that ACEs are a public health crisis with far reaching consequences on the health and well-being of Californians,” according to the report, “A Hidden Crisis,” which wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal. Instead, the Center for Youth Wellness self-published the study.
The term ACEs refers to the childhood abuse, neglect, and general household dysfunction that negatively affect a child’s development to the point of long lasting health consequences later in life. The more ACEs a child experiences, the higher the ACE score and the greater the likelihood of health problems as an adult. The ACEs scale goes from 0-10.
People with particularly agonizing childhoods, scoring 4 or more ACEs, are 13 times more likely to have been placed in child welfare; they have less education, less money and are more likely to be unemployed, according to the study.
[For more of this story, written by Brian Rinker, go to https://chronicleofsocialchang...c-health-crisis/8521]
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