Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE) - Help spread the knowledge
This is the ACE test you don’t want to ace. Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE study) was a research conducted in 1995 and 1997. What did they find? Well they found the source of all problems on earth.
- Physical abuse
- Sexual abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Physical neglect
- Emotional neglect
- Mother treated violently
- Household substance abuse
- Household mental illness
- Parental separation or divorce
- Incarcerated household member
This are the experiences, according to this study and the 50 more conducted since, that increase your risks for an entire range of diseases, physically and mentally. You can take the test here (https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/) to be able to follow the rest of the article with your own childhood score.
These are not the only types of abuse, only the most common and with the worst outcomes for most people. The whole idea about this test began in an obesity clinic, San Diego, CA. Dr. Vincent Felitti was bewildered by the fact that 50% of his patients were dropping out after they started to lose weight, serious weight, 100 pounds(45kg) or more. This mystery made him work 25 years to find out why these people were “ruining my attempt to build a successful program”.
He started with no success to interview patience, on their weight on different stages of development, to see patterns, they were none. One day on a new questionnaire he added a question “How much did you weigh when you were first sexually active?”. He asked a woman this question. The answer was 40 pounds (18 kg), The doctor was confused, he asked again. Same answer, 40 pounds, the woman began crying and said “It was when I was 4 years old, with my father.”
Dr. Vincent remembers “This is only the second incest case I’ve had in 23 years of practice. I didn’t know what to do with the information. About 10 days later, I ran into the same thing. It was very disturbing. Every other person was providing information about childhood sexual abuse. I thought, ‘This can’t be true. People would know if that were true. Someone would have told me in medical school.”
After interviewing 286 people in the clinic they found that most of them were sexually abused as children. This people that were 100-400 pounds (45-180kg) over weight, didn’t see this as a problem, but as a solution. If they didn’t eat, their anxiety, depression, and fear would rise to levels that were intolerable.
This led to the actual questionnaire in 1995 to 1997 with participants followed for more than fifteen years. They were 17 421 people. When the findings came in, Vincents said “I wept, I saw how much people had suffered and I wept.”
This is the story of this study, now let’s see what made the doctor so sad, what were the findings?
As you can see there are a lot of correlations with nasty problems in adult lives. The best way to deal with this, if you have experienced abuse, is to go to therapy. If you do nothing chances are things could go badly.
There are also a lot of correlations with diseases. If you have an ACE score of 4 or more, the chances for you to develop chronic pulmonary lung disease increases 390%, compared to a 0 Ace score. Hepatitis 240%, and a lot more.
CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) (http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2012/p0201_child_abuse.html) have concluded a study that reveals the following. Just one year of child abuse costs 210 000$ over his/her lifetime. The study used only data from confirmed cases of physical, sexual, verbal abuse and neglect.
The abuse cost per child in his lifetime was:
- $32 648 in health care as a child
- $10 530 in health care as an adult
- $144 360 in productivity losses
- $7 700 in welfare costs as a child
- $6 700 Criminal justice costs
- $8 000 special education cost
Let’s try to get this information out there, a lot of people are unaware of the damage they sustained in the most important part of their development. Where there is no conscious effort, there can be no change, and we need change, we need more happiness in the world.