Trauma, Resilience, and Looking Ahead

The Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) study was born out of Dr. Felitti and Anda noticing patterns of childhood sexual abuse among patients with obesity; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) crafted a large-scale epidemiological study of 17,000 middle class Americans receiving treatment at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego that aimed to uncover what factors in early childhood may be having later consequences on the health of the population (Redford, 2016, 6:00). Two waves of data collection, undertaken between 1995 and 1997, involved giving these 17,000 patients who were receiving physical examinations an additional set of questions about difficult experiences that they may have had before the age of 18 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024b). As a result, researchers found that there are ten questions to ask in order to screen for ACEs, the cumulative score of which acted as a strong predictor for a number of health problems (Center on the Developing Child, 2019).