I receive a steady stream of electronic newsletters. There’s the Children’s Bureau Express and the publication that originates from the Evan B. Donaldson Institute.
The Child Information Gateway has an e-newsletter. And here’s one called the NRCFCPPP (National Resource Center for Family-Centered Practice and Permanency Planning.)


It was through these informative newsletters that I learned about the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. The Kaiser Permanente HMO and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are collaborating on a major research project to study the effects of negative childhood experiences on adult physical and emotional health.


In an article titled: The Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Health: Turning gold into lead, it asks the question… How does this happen, this reverse alchemy, turning the gold of a newborn infant into the lead of a depressed, diseased adult?


I also found this comment particularly interesting…

The Study makes it clear that time does not heal some of the adverse experiences we found so common in the childhoods of a large population of middle-aged, middle class Americans. One does not ‘just get over’ some things, not even fifty years later.

This study began as an incidental finding of a study of obesity and high school dropout rates. The authors discovered a clear relationship between childhood sexual abuse and obesity. Although the project participants (those being studied) understood there was a relationship between the two issues, they had been unsuccessful in getting anyone in the medical professions to draw the correlation. The authors of the article concluded that obesity was in many cases not their patient’s problem; it was their personal solution to a hidden problem they had never shared with anyone. One woman was quoted as saying, “Overweight is overlooked and that’s the way I need to be.” How many of us have kids that fold into themselves and barely move through life? “Overlooked” is an understatement.


In the next segment I’ll describe the categories defined for this project… and how they interrelate. Very interesting stuff, I assure you!

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