It’s pretty striking, says Dr. David Brown, the lead author on research released by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine last week, that examine the link between child trauma and early mortality. “It’s pretty striking that someone with six or more ACEs died 20 years earlier.”  Brown, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is part of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, a joint project of the CDC and Kaiser Permanente in San Diego. Here’s the link to the AJPM article: Adverse Childhood Experiences and the Risk of Premature Mortality.

Several organizations did articles about the research. I did two in the Lawrence Journal-World:

Traumatic childhood takes 20 years off life expectancy
Social service agencies, public health communities use ACE, but not medical community

Here are two other good articles:

Is Life Expectancy Reduced by a Traumatic Childhood? in ScientificAmerican.com.

Childhood May Shorten Life by 20 Years on ABCNews.com.

If you run across any others that aren’t repeats of the press release, please add them. Somewhere on this blog, I’ll put them all together.

Although the interest about the effects of child trauma isn’t particularly high the traditional media as yet, AJPM managing editor Charlotte Seidman says that the first ACE Study published in 1998 has been in the top-five or top-ten most viewed on the AJPM site every year since its publication.