There are some wounds that never heal — some injuries that are invisible to the naked eye, even though they scar the individual forever.
Decades of research suggests that the wounds created by child abuse and neglect inflict serious physical and mental health issues on individuals later in life, including cancer, depression, substance abuse, and chronic fatigue. The correlation between adverse early childhood experiences and poor health later in life was famously uncovered in a study by American insurance giant Kaiser Permanente between 1995 and 1997.
The company followed more than 17,000 patients during their annual physical exams and had them complete confidential surveys about their childhood experiences and current health status and behaviours. The results were printed in the May 1998 American Journal of Preventive Medicine with the title, “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults.”
“After that famous study,” explains Deinera Exner-Cortens, a researcher with the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Calgary, “many, many other studies were published that supported those findings, showing linear gradients — like dose-response — the more adverse childhood experiences you have, the worse your health is later in life, physical and mental, in every way.”
[For more of this story, written by Don McSwiney, go to http://www.ucalgary.ca/utoday/...t-and-working-memory]
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