PACEs Science 101

What is PACEs science?

The science of PACEs refers to the research about the stunning effects of positive and adverse childhood experiences (PACEs) and how they work together to affect our lives, as well as our organizations, systems and communities. It comprises:

  1. The CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study and subsequent surveys that show that most people in the U.S. have at least one ACE, and that people with four ACEs— including living with an alcoholic parent, racism, bullying, witnessing violence outside the home, physical abuse, and losing a parent to divorce — have a huge risk of adult onset of chronic health problems such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, suicide, and alcoholism.
  2. Brain science (neurobiology of toxic stress) — how toxic stress caused by ACEs damages the function and structure of kids’ developing brains.
  3. Health consequences — how toxic stress caused by ACEs affects short- and long-term health, and can impact every part of the body, leading to autoimmune diseases, such as arthritis, as well as heart disease, breast cancer, lung cancer, etc.
  4. Historical and generational trauma (epigenetic consequences of toxic stress) — how toxic stress caused by ACEs can alter how our DNA functions, and how that can be passed on from generation to generation.
  5. Positive Childhood Experiences and resilience research and practice — Building on the knowledge that the brain is plastic and the body wants to heal, this part of PACEs science includes evidence-based practice, as well as practice-based evidence by people, organizations and communities that are integrating trauma-informed and resilience-building practices. This ranges from looking at how the brain of a teen with a high ACE score can be healed with cognitive behavior therapy, to how schools can integrate trauma-informed and resilience-building practices that result in an increase in students’ scores, test grades and graduation rates.

1. What are ACEs?

ACEs are adverse childhood experiences that harm children’s developing brains and lead to changing how they respond to stress and damaging their immune systems so profoundly that the effects show up decades later. ACEs cause much of our burden of chronic disease, most mental illness, and are at the root of most violence.

“ACEs” comes from the CDC-Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, a groundbreaking public health study that discovered that childhood trauma leads to the adult onset of chronic diseases, depression and other mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence, as well as financial and social problems. The ACE Study has published about 70 research papers since 1998. Hundreds of additional research papers based on the ACE Study have also been published.

The 10 ACEs the researchers measured:

— Physical, sexual and verbal abuse.

— Physical and emotional neglect.

— A family member who is:

  • depressed or diagnosed with other mental illness;
  • addicted to alcohol or another substance;
  • in prison.

— Witnessing a mother being abused.

— Losing a parent to separation, divorce or other reason.

Subsequent to the ACE Study, other ACE surveys have expanded the types of ACEs to include racism, gender discrimination, witnessing a sibling being abused, witnessing violence outside the home, witnessing a father being abused by a mother, being bullied by a peer or adult, involvement with the foster care system, living in a war zone, living in an unsafe neighborhood, losing a family member to deportation, etc.

ACEs fall into three large categories:

  • Adverse childhood experiences
  • Adverse community experiences
  • Adverse climate experiences

Resources:

CDC ACE Study site

Wikipedia — Adverse Childhood Experiences Study

The 10 ACE Questions (and 14 resilience survey questions)

The Pair of ACEs: The Soil in Which We’re Rooted, the Branches on Which We Grow

A3RealmsACEs

 

Why are ACEs significant?

1. The ACE Study revealed six main discoveries:

  • ACEs are common…nearly two-thirds (64%) of adults have at least one.
  • They cause adult onset of chronic disease, such as cancer and heart disease, as well as mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence
  • ACEs don’t occur alone….if you have one, there’s an 87% chance that you have two or more.
  • The more ACEs you have, the greater the risk for chronic disease, mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence. People have an ACE score of 0 to 10. Each type of trauma counts as one, no matter how many times it occurs. You can think of an ACE score as a cholesterol score for childhood trauma. For example, people with an ACE score of 4 are twice as likely to be smokers and seven times more likely to be alcoholic. Having an ACE score of 4 increases the risk of emphysema or chronic bronchitis by nearly 400 percent, and attempted suicide by 1200 percent. People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more autoimmune diseases. People with an ACE score of 6 or higher are at risk of their lifespan being shortened by 20 years.
  • ACEs are responsible for a big chunk of workplace absenteeism, and for costs in health care, emergency response, mental health and criminal justice. So, the fifth finding from the ACE Study is that childhood adversity contributes to most of our major chronic health, mental health, economic health and social health issues.
  • On a population level, it doesn’t matter which four ACEs a person has; the harmful consequences are the same. The brain cannot distinguish one type of toxic stress from another; it’s all toxic stress, with the same impact.

What’s particularly startling is that the 17,000 ACE Study participants were mostly white, middle- and upper-middle class, college-educated, and all had jobs and great health care (they were all members of Kaiser Permanente).

Resources:

ACE Study primer — KPJR Films, which came out with Paper Tigers in 2015 and Resilience in 2016, put together this five-minute overview of the ACE Study.

ACE Study video — Three-minute trailer for a four-hour CD of interviews with ACEs researchers produced by the Academy on Violence and Abuse.

How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime (16-minute TED Talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris)

The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study – the largest public health study you never heard of – started in an obesity clinic

Has anyone else done an ACE Study?

Thirty-six states and Washington, D.C. (infographic) have done one or more ACE surveys. Here are links to some of their reports (some states haven’t produced reports).

There are numerous other ACE surveys, including cities, such as Philadelphia; organizations, including the Crittenton Foundation; schools, including Spokane elementary schools; by pediatricians, including Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and Dr. Victor Carrion (2011 and 2013); several countries, including England, Saudi Arabia, and a World Health Organization ACE survey of university students in Romania,; and 64,000 juvenile offenders in the Florida juvenile justice system. You can find a list of ACE surveys, including expanded ACE surveys with more questions, in the Resources Section of ACEsConnection.com.

2. What’s the neurobiology of toxic stress?

Brain science shows that, in the absence of protective factors, toxic stress damages children’s developing brains. Stress is the body’s normal response to challenging events or environments. Positive stress — the first day of school, a big exam, a sports challenge — is part of growing up, and parents or caregivers help children prepare for and learn how to handle positive stress, which is moderate and doesn’t last long. It increases heart rate and the amount of stress hormones in the body, but they return to normal levels quickly.

But when events or the environment are threatening or harmful – we stumble across a bear in the woods – our brains instantly zap into fight, flight or freeze mode and bypass our thinking brains, which can be way too analytical to save us (Is the bear really mean? Is it more interested in berries or killing me? Should I wait until I see it charge?). With help from caring adults, children also recover from this tolerable stress.

Too much stress – toxic stress – occurs when that raging bear comes home from the bar every night, says pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris. Then a child’s brain and body will produce an overload of stress hormones — such as cortisol and adrenaline — that harm the function and structure of the brain. This can be particularly devastating in children, whose brains are developing at a galloping pace from before they are born to age three. Toxic stress is the kind of stress that can come in response to living for months or years with a screaming alcoholic father, a severely depressed and neglectful mother or a parent who takes out life’s frustrations by whipping a belt across a child’s body.

Resources:

Harvard University Center on the Developing Child

Video: Toxic Stress Derails Healthy Development (2 min)

An Unhealthy Dose of Stress (Center for Youth Wellness white paper)

The Science Behind PTSD Symptoms: How Trauma Changes the Brain

Brain Story Certification, Alberta Family Wellness Initiative

3. What are the health effects of toxic stress?

Chronic toxic stress—living in a red alert mode for months or years — can also damage our bodies. In a red alert state, the body pumps out adrenaline and cortisol continuously. Over time, the constant presence of adrenaline and cortisol keep blood pressure high, which weakens the heart and circulatory system. They also keep glucose levels high to provide enough energy for the heart and muscles to act quickly; this can lead to type 2 diabetes. Too much adrenaline and cortisol can also increase cholesterol.

Too much cortisol can lead to osteoporosis, arthritis, gastrointestinal disease, depression, anorexia nervosa, Cushing’s syndrome, hyperthyroidism and the shrinkage of lymph nodes, leading to the inability to ward off infections.

If the red alert system is always on, eventually the adrenal glands give out, and the body can’t produce enough cortisol to keep up with the demand. This may cause the immune system to attack parts of the body, which can lead to lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia.

Cortisol is also extremely important in maintaining the body’s appropriate inflammation response. In a normal response to a bee sting or infection, the body rushes antibodies, white blood cells and other cell fighters to the site and the tissues swell while the battle rages. But too much swelling damages tissue. Cortisol controls this fine balance. So without the mediating effects of cortisol, the inflammatory response runs amok and can cause a host of diseases.

If you’re chronically stressed and then experience an additional traumatic event, your body will have trouble returning to a normal state. Over time, you will become more sensitive to trauma or stress, developing a hair-trigger response to events that other people shrug off.

Biomedical researchers say that childhood trauma is biologically embedded in our bodies: Children with adverse childhood experiences and adults who have experienced childhood trauma may respond more quickly and strongly to events or conversations that would not affect those with no ACEs, and have higher levels of indicators for inflammation than those who have not suffered childhood trauma. This wear and tear on the body is the main reason why the lifespan of people with an ACE score of six or higher is likely to be shortened by 20 years.

Resources:

Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal, by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel Van Der Kolk

The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, by Nadine Burke Harris, 2018.

Scared Sick: The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease by Robin Karr-Morse with Meredith S. Wiley

Biologial Embedding of Early Social Adversity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012

PubMed childhood adversity research publications

4. What’s epigenetics and how does that relate to historical or generational trauma?

Most people believe that the DNA we’re born with does not change and that it determines all that we are during our lifetime. That’s true, but the research from epigenetics — the study of how social and other environments turn our genes on and off — shows that toxic stress can actually change how our genes function, which can lead to long-term changes in all parts of our bodies and brains. What’s more, these changes can be transferred from generation to generation.

Epigenetics means “above the genome” and refers to changes in gene expression that are not the result of changes in the DNA sequence (or mutations).

Resources:

WhatIsEpigenetics.com — This New York-based blog and news aggregator covers the field of epigenetics and is funded by EpiGentek. It includes backgrounders, including epigenetics fundamentals.

Epigenetics — From the Genetics Science Learning Center at the University of Utah, this section includes explainers and an overview of how the social environment affects your epigenome.

Epigenetics 101: A beginner’s guide to explaining everything (TheGuardian.com, 2014)

5. Positive Childhood Experiences and resilience research: If you have a high ACE score, are you doomed? No!

The good news is that the brain is plastic, and the body wants to heal.

The brain is continually changing in response to the environment. If the toxic stress stops and is replaced by practices that build resilience, the brain can slowly undo many of the stress-induced changes.

There is well documented research on how individuals’ brains and bodies become healthier through mindfulness practices, exercise, good nutrition, adequate sleep, and healthy social interactions.

Here’s a good article that weaves the unified science of human development together: Scars That Don’t Fade, from Massachusetts General Hospital’s Proto Magazine.

In the last few years, researchers have started to examine the impacts of positive childhood experiences (PCEs) on children and adults. We at PACEs Connection are particularly interested in the interplay between positive and adverse childhood experiences. Here’s some of the relevant research:

Who’s using PACEs science?

Many people, organizations, agencies, systems and communities are beginning to implement trauma-informed, resilience-building practices based on PACEs science.

Resources:

Community Resilience Cookbook (nine case studies of cities and states that are integrating PACEs research)

Growing Resilient Communities provides guidelines and tools for communities to launch and grow local PACEs initiatives, and measure the progress of their work.

What does trauma-informed mean?

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAHMSA), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a trauma-informed approach refers to how an organization or community thinks about and responds to children and adults who have experienced or may be at risk for experiencing trauma. In this approach, the whole community understands the prevalence and impact of ACEs, the role trauma plays in people’s lives, and the complex and varied paths for healing and recovery.

A trauma-informed approach asks: “What happened to you?” instead of “What’s wrong with you?” It is designed to avoid re-traumatizing already traumatized people, with a focus on “safety first” (including emotional safety), and a commitment to do no harm. But a trauma-informed approach is most successful when an organization or community builds policies and practices based on a foundation of ACEs science.

Resources:

SAMHSA overview of what trauma-informed is and isn’t

National Center for Trauma-Informed Care

SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach — Introduces a concept of trauma and offers a framework for how an organization, system, or service sector can become trauma-informed. Includes a definition of trauma (the three “E’s”), a definition of a trauma-informed approach (the four “R’s”), 6 key principles, and 10 implementation domains.

Any legislation or federal policies?

Updates on U.S. state and federal legislation can be found in the State ACEs Resolutions and Laws section of State PACEs Action on PACEsConnection.com. Some examples:

California legislature resolution to reduce ACEs

Massachusetts bill on trauma-informed schools

Vermont attempt to pass ACEs bill

Overview of state, federal legislation

US Department of Health and Human Services guidelines to state health directors (and the letter to state health directors)

All resources:

CDC ACE Study site

A Critical Assessment of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study at 20 Years (attached)

Wikipedia — Adverse Childhood Experiences Study

The 10 ACE Questions (and 14 resilience survey questions)

Harvard University Center on the Developing Child (neurobiology of toxic stress)

Alberta Family Wellness Initiative (Canada)

ACEsTooHigh.com – News site covering PACEs research and practices

PACEsConnection.com – Social network (with 18,000+ members across sectors) and more than 100 community sites that support ACEs initiatives in cities, counties, states, regions and nations.

WhatIsEpigenetics.com – News site covering epigenetics

Epigenetics — Explainers and backgrounders about epigenetics

National Center for Trauma-Informed Care

Community Resilience Cookbook — Nine case studies of cities and states that are integrating PACEs research)

SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach — Introduces a concept of trauma and offers a framework for how an organization, system, or service sector can become trauma-informed. Includes a definition of trauma (the three “E’s”), a definition of a trauma-informed approach (the four “R’s”), 6 key principles, and 10 implementation domains.

Videos:

ACE Study video (three minute trailer)

Video: Toxic Stress Derails Healthy Development (2 min)

How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime (16-minute TED Talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris)

Books:

Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal, by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel Van Der Kolk

The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, by Nadine Burke Harris, 2018.

Scared Sick: The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease by Robin Karr-Morse with Meredith S. Wiley

The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back My Body, My Joy, and My Life, by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

For other books, go to the ACEs Connection Books community.

Documentaries:

Paper Tigers — What does it mean to be a trauma-informed school? And how do you educate teens whose childhood experiences have left them with a brain and body ill-suited to learn? This film follows six students through a year in America’s first trauma-informed high school.

Resilience — Resilience chronicles how trailblazers in pediatrics, education, and social welfare are using cutting-edge science and field-tested therapies to protect children from the insidious effects of toxic stress.

CAREgivers — How is the professional care provider affected emotionally and physically, and who helps them?

For a list of all documentaries addressing PACEs science, and how to access them, go here.

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If you’re interested in becoming more involved in the PACEs science community, join our companion social network, PACEs Connection. Just go to PACEsConnection.com and click “Join”. PACEsConnection.com is the leading advocate for information about the science of positive and adverse childhood experiences (PACEs) and the rapidly expanding, global PACEs science movement. 

 

357 comments

  8. “People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more …” Wow…just wow. It would seem that sensitivity is not the author’s strong suit or maybe just the web developer. If you’re a survivor and read this terrible line on Google, please know you are not what happened to you and definitely not whoever this author thinks you are.

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    • @Jessica, it says ‘more likely’. This is a fact. What people don’t need to hear is this pop psychology nonsense. You are in fact what happened to you, good or bad. The article clearly indicates that ACEs are ‘facts, not fate’ (even though they are for some people). For meaningful change to happen, we first need to face things as they are.

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    • Solutions abound, whether they’re personal, familial, organizational or in communities. Join PACEsConnection.com (the sister social network to ACEsTooHigh.com) to find them and the people who are developing solutions. It’s free!

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  16. […] In 1995, a joint effort from the CDC and Kaiser Permanente resulted in the creation of a large-scale ACE study which is a simple 10-item questionnaire that completely changed the way the medical community viewed the impact of these early childhood experiences. The study looks at three sets of questions highlighting abuse, neglect, and household challenges that an individual faced, and compared them to health outcomes later in life. What they found was groundbreaking: (source) […]

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  18. […] There’s also a whole bunch of research showing that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) — whether physical, emotional, or social — can change your brain and your stress response so you become more sensitive to future stressors and have a harder time returning to a normal state after being stressed. (For an eye-opening summary of this research, see the website Aces Too High.) […]

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  22. I am a 68 year old mom and grandma with and ACE’s of 9 during childhood years and added the last one (making 10 of 10) during my married life. I lived my life knowing of most of the traumas until 64. At that time I was triggered I to the onset of CPTSD. I am fortunate to have been a patient if Kaiser at that time and chose to put myself into intense outpatient therapy 5 days a week for two years. When I had my breakdown, friends and family, and myself, did not even recognize me, as even my physical looks changed for a period of time as I was going through therapy. The worst physical changes occurred when I went through flashbacks. I moved to Texas (the state of my birth), to be with a man whom I went to high school with on Okinawa. My story is long and intense. I won’t place it here. As an Army BRAT (affectionately), I suffered through many different types of trauma starting at 9mos. Old! All of the different eras of my father’s Army life and deployments created such havoc for me and my family. My traumas started out as emotional, went to physical from violence, and when I was 12 changed into sexual (Along with the mental, emotional and physical violence) after my fathers tour of duty in Vietnam. Anyway, I would love to find a therapist in my area of Texas. I do rather well, but sometimes doing it is such a challenge. I have always been high functioning and thank God, still and. Thank you so much for listening and reading herein. 🙏

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  27. Is there any work on the downstream effects of ACEs on their children – the reverberated effects manifesting in their own children and their relationships?

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  28. […] ACEs can affect anyone, HSPs are particularly vulnerable. Research shows that HSPs raised in dysfunctional environments often have devastating lifelong difficulties. More […]

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  44. […] Biomedical researchers say that childhood trauma is biologically embedded in our bodies: Children with adverse childhood experiences and adults who have experienced childhood trauma may respond more quickly and strongly to events or conversations that would not affect those with no ACEs, and have higher levels of indicators for inflammation than those who have not suffered childhood trauma. This wear and tear on the body is the main reason why the lifespan of people with an ACE score of six or higher is likely to be shortened by 20 years. https://acestoohigh.com/aces-101/ […]

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  59. Thank you! I am a 12 year old with PTSD from abuse both physical and verbal and an ACE of 6, and now I finally understand why I’ve felt so different from other children my age. I had some odd symptoms that I can’t explain, most adults, including DOCTORS would think I am faking it. I may have MS so the next time I’ll try to ask for a test.

    Thanks so much again,
    Arianna

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  63. […] ACEs or Adverse Childhood Experiences are serious childhood traumas that result in toxic stress that can harm a child’s developing brain.  This toxic stress may prevent a child from learning, playing with other children in a healthy way and can also result in long-term health problems.  Some examples of ACEs include: emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, incarcerated household member, parental separation, household substance abuse, household mental illness, and even bullying.  https://acestoohigh.com/aces-101/ […]

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  65. […] According to the CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study, separation from a primary caregiver in childhood (either through illness, divorce, or death) is considered an adverse childhood experience. There are 10 adverse childhood experiences listed that have significant, long-term effects on the developing health and wellness of children who endure them. For more information, check out https://acestoohigh.com/aces-101/ […]

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  72. This blows my mind. I’m learning about belief systems and how they impact the physical healing of the body, and this is just another addition to a bounty of info. I will be exploring this more and more:)

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  76. Wow. Just wow. Reading the first 1/4 of this page was rather triggering, and I felt as if I were reading my own biography. So much makes sense now that i could never quite connect before. Fortunately the second part of the page served as a light at the end of the tunnel, an indication that it could be possible to break (or at least weaken) the cycle of trauma for my children and grandchildren. So glad I signed up for a semester of child welfare. My family as well as my friends at the orphanage will profit well from this training.

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  82. […] “Most people in the U.S. have at least one ACE, and people with four ACEs— including living with an alcoholic parent, racism, bullying, witnessing violence outside the home, physical abuse, and losing a parent to divorce — have a huge risk of adult-onset of chronic health problems such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, suicide, and alcoholism.” – ­ACEs 101 […]

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  89. […] Children affected by incarceration are a vulnerable population. Often they are living in poverty. Also, because 92% of incarcerated parents are fathers, they live with either a single mother, a relative or in the foster care system. They are, more often than not, black. One in 9 African-American children have a parent in prison, compared to one in 57 white children. The feelings of abandonment when a parent is incarcerated harm a child’s developing brain. It changes how they respond to stress and damages their immune systems so profoundly that the effects …. […]

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  93. […] We have learned so far that mental trauma, ACE’s, PTSD, or even our parents divorce can result in health problems. The trauma just wasn’t felt in the heart but actually affected our brain, our nervous system, our gut biome, and a cascade of disease has ensued. According to the ACE’s Too High website, “ Too much stress – toxic stress – occurs when that raging bear comes home from the bar every night says pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris. Then a child’s brain and body will produce an overload of stress hormones — such as cortisol and adrenaline — that harm the function and structure of the brain. This can be particularly devastating in children, whose brains are developing at a galloping pace from before they are born to age three. Toxic stress is the kind of stress that can come in response to living for months or years with a screaming alcoholic father, a severely depressed and neglectful mother or a parent who takes out life’s frustrations by whipping a belt across a child’s body.”6 […]

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  95. […] Some are happy with their credit score while others are disappointed. Credit scores have a huge impact on what opportunities and ventures you can set out to achieve like buying a house or buying a car etc. It’s no wonder that many people frequently check their credit score to see where they are financially from Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, and Very Poor. No one wants a in the red zone score because it creates barriers for people trying to achieve greater things in life. My question then is why do people not place the same level of importance on their ACE Score? Maybe You are not informed or have never heard of an ACE Score before reading this. (READ ON).  ACEs are common, with nearly two-thirds (64%) of adults have at least one. https://acestoohigh.com/aces-101/ […]

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    • Blame is not very helpful in solving anyone’s problems. Understanding your life, your parents’ lives, your grandparents’ lives, etc., you can see how behavior can be handed down from one generation to another. And then, interrupting the cycle, starting with yourself, is the way to healing.

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  122. Kuddos to everyone commitment to creating trauma sensitive environs
    wherever they happen to find themselves! Kindness, caring nurturers who see the
    needs and willingly plow into the trenches with a positive mindset. IT CAN AND DOES
    MAKE A DIFFERENCE!!

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  125. […] Children affected by incarceration are a vulnerable population. Often they are living in poverty. Also, because 92% of incarcerated parents are fathers, they live with either a single mother, a relative or in the foster care system. They are, more often than not, black. One in 9 African-American children have a parent in prison, compared to one in 57 white children. The feelings of abandonment when a parent is incarcerated harm a child’s developing brain. It changes how they respond to stress and damages their immune systems so profoundly that the effects …. […]

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  141. […] Sometimes, we learn as much from students as they do from us. Among the things I enjoy most about working in a University setting are the opportunities it can offer for meaningful conversations that prompt us to ask different questions, see new connections between diverse themes and experiences, and explore the implications for our thinking and practices. I have had several overlapping conversations of this kind over the past year or so. The most sustained of these has been with Juleus Ghunta, a Jamaican Chevening scholar who, as he describes in this blog post, came to Bradford to deepen his understanding of the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on his life. In a nutshell, ACEs are traumatic experiences – including various interpersonal forms of abuse and neglect as well as exposure to settings and cultures of violence and deprivation – that affect children’s health and development in far-reaching ways. […]

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  148. […] who do not follow those messages, this is a stressful time in our culture. Studies such as the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences study) show that not only do many of us carry stress and trauma from our childhood, but that stress, along […]

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  149. Just read the article – great information and resources – I wondered – is there a one question “lead-in” to the ACES survey that anyone has used – or any other thoughts in that regard?

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  151. […] ACEs are adverse childhood experiences that harm children’s developing brains and lead to changing how they respond to stress and damaging their immune systems so profoundly that the effects show up decades later. ACEs cause much of our burden of chronic disease, most mental illness, and are at the root of most violence. More information can be found at: https://acestoohigh.com/aces-101/ […]

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  152. […] “You can think of an ACE score as a cholesterol score for childhood trauma. For example, people with an ACE score of 4 are twice as likely to be smokers and seven times more likely to be alcoholic. Having an ACE score of 4 increases the risk of emphysema or chronic bronchitis by nearly 400 percent, and suicide by 1200 percent.” (source) […]

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  161. […] Western Youth Services – Did you know that childhood trauma is an epidemic? That one in five children has a diagnosable mental health condition? That childhood trauma is associated, in many cases, with lifelong health and mental health outcomes? This predictive outcome is identified in the ground-breaking Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. The original ACE Study was conducted in 1998 by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente; you can find more information on the ACEs Too High website… […]

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  174. […] gets stuck in the body and unconscious levels of the brain. I highly recommend learning about how Adverse Childhood Experiences lead to health issues. The more stress or toxins (emotional, chemical, environmental, or physical) […]

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  178. […] I want to share that sometimes bad things happen to good people, and sometimes good people do bad things. Sometimes these things affect children, affect their growth and development, affect their behavior, can even affect their future mental and physical health. […]

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  181. […] Our experiences, especially the ones in childhood, create our templates and filters for how to process stimuli and stressors and respond. The first three years of life creates the blueprint for all future relationships. Most caregivers do not realize how impactful their reactions, mood, and behaviors are on their children. Children depend on caregivers for everything so if a caregiver is angry, depressed, neglectful, out of control or acting in a way the child doesn’t understand, then the child will perceive this as a threat to their livelihood which will activate their stress response system. I highly recommend learning about Adverse Childhood Experiences. […]

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  195. […] The higher one’s ACEs score, the more likely one is to, as an adult, have significant health, emotional, and behavioral problems like cancer, financial problems, depression, heart disease, smoking, and obesity. [4] When children are exposed to sustained trauma and toxic stress, the body produces stress hormones that alter the neural pathways of developing brains (Perry et al.,1995). When the brain is stressed–flooded by powerful hormones like cortisol–the body struggles to recover to a “normal” state, which in turn increased the chances for developing a “trigger” response (or anxiety) to future stresses (Stevens “ACEs Science 101”). […]

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  202. Dear Jane, I’m working on an ACEs fact sheet for patients to give physicians and wonder if we know how many ACE studies have been done (I saw your stats on 35 states)? And / or how many articles have been published? And / or if you have a source for such info?

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    • Hi, Veronique — 39 states now, plus the District of Columbia, several countries (through WHO’s ACE surveys); hundreds of research papers (go to PubMed and search for “adverse childhood experiences”). Hundreds of schools and pediatricians integrating ACEs science into their organizations; hundreds of communities starting local ACEs initiatives; hundreds, perhaps low thousands, of organizations integrating trauma-informed practices based on ACEs science. We’re working on a GIS map to capture much of this. Stay tuned!

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  209. Has anyone looked for a relationship between ACE scores and how children do in school (GPA, test scores, comprehension etc.) I was going to do a survey about it for my senior project and I would like to see any studies done, if any, to try and base mine around those.

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  210. This is so important, thank you for sharing.
    I love how you mention that the body wants to heal and rid of the toxic stress. It’s never too late for the children or for us – we can all heal!

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  212. As an adult with an ACE score of 9 I hope someone is using this research to inform the legal system in pursuit of offenders and deciding on sentencing after conviction.

    As someone who has suffered GREAT losses as an adult due to the abuse and trauma I experienced as a child, I am often appalled at the light sentencing these offenders get.

    Children can suffer for a lifetime from being abused. A few short years in prison does not seem commensurate with the crime.

    Its time we see the true cost of this crime not just to the child but to our world who will not have the benefit of the work that child could have contributed to our society. We will never know what they may have invented or the cure they may have developed or the president they might have been. These things they have lost and most certainly our society has too.

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    • My ACE Score is 9, also. I understand we are very rare. Only about 1% of people have that score, and most are destroyed by addiction, social problems, chronic disease, and early death.

      I’d like to see ACE science applied to education at every level of society.

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  221. Amazing love it. I am a counselor who scored eight of ten. I have always had trouble dealing with stress and anxiety. I am a recovering alcoholic and all of this toxic stress makes sense. Coping mechanism are difficult to engage when you either don’t have them duh or take the path of least resistance via drugs sex or any other tension reductive behavior. Love it

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  223. […] “You can think of an ACE score as a cholesterol score for childhood trauma. For example, people with an ACE score of 4 are twice as likely to be smokers and seven times more likely to be alcoholic. Having an ACE score of 4 increases the risk of emphysema or chronic bronchitis by nearly 400 percent, and suicide by 1200 percent.” (source) […]

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  255. Thanks. Do you know why it was not included? Was it because this type of crisis is so apparent typically it is addressed immediately whereas other stresses are hidden or kept secret?

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  272. […] Last week, and the week before, I reported on efforts over the past two decades to put more of this kind of knowledge into effect. Specifically, I examined how community-based networks were sharing research with professionals and residents in numerous communities, about how the effects of childhood trauma — so-called adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs — substantially increase risks for a range of negative outcomes, including dropping out of school, abusing drugs, becoming depressed, committing suicide, and being a victim of, or a perpetrator, of violence or abuse. (For information about ACEs, including the landmark ACE study and “ACE scores,” see these infographics and resources.) […]

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    • I know it has been a while, but I saw this and just had to respond. Though this study focuses on the negative impact of ACE’s, it does not spend as much time on the aspect of lived experience that can protect us, even undo the impact of our ACE’s- resilience. Please do not see yourself as doomed, many of us have had challenges, however, having “Promotive” or “Protective” factors can mitigate the impact our ACE’s might have had on us. If we are able to work, to help and love others, to problem-solve and lead productive lives- it is likely we had enough support and protection to give us the strength and ability to overcome the challenges we encountered in our childhoods. Do not give up hope or let this data rob you of your successes!!

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      • Hi, Laura: Good point. You’ll find that information in one of the five parts of ACE science: resilience research that demonstrates post-traumatic growth, whether for individuals, families, organizations or communities.

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  275. My ACE score is 7. I’m 24 (almost 25), a woman with a successful career and a successful relationship of 1 year. Unfortunately for me I was raped when i was 19. I was also physically, emotionally, & mentally abused by my ex-fiance. I have a horrible heart condition which first presented itself when i was 15 and during my parent’s nasty divorce. I feel like most days I have it together. I feel like I’m doing well, I’m fun and outgoing and responsible. I’m healthy and active and decently attractive. I’m nice and loving and hard-working. I would say that my childhood experiences reflect most in my romantic relationships.

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  285. […] injury that induced him to violence, which is unlikely because it’s so rare, or he had many adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that he never resolved.” […]

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  293. […] physical, emotional or even sexual abuse. These are known as Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs. Research on ACEs indicates that these experiences can cause many health risks in adults such as […]

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  295. […] What did the research determine regarding these ACEs? • Almost two-thirds of those studied had at least one ACE and 87% of those had 2 or more ACEs. • These traumatic events cause adult onset chronic disease, mental illness, violence and becoming a victim of violence. • The more ACEs you have the more risk of these later adult onset issues arising. People with an ACE score of 4 are twice as likely to be smokers and 7 times more likely to be alcoholic. Having an ACE score of 4 increases the risk of emphysema by nearly 400% and suicide by 1200%. People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, drug prescriptions, depression and autoimmune diseases. People with an ACE score of 6 or more are at risk of their lifespan being shortened by 20 years. • Childhood adversity contributes to most of our major chronic health, mental health, economic health and social health issues. https://acestoohigh.com/aces-101/ […]

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  301. I’m 28. I’ve an ace score of 6. I’m obese..I’ve lost my hair..lost my smile as I gotta fake it..I’m in a long distance relationship with a girl whom I’ve never seen but intend to be with her..though I’m with my old parents..I’m often feel isolated..all of my friends are married and settled so I don’t have friends and corporate friendship is merely nothing but business.. what’s a solution for me to be Born again ad a new man..I wanna forget everything ..I wish I had an amnesia … please guide me… as of now I feel God is the only one who ever loved me..

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  310. […] ACEs include mental, emotional, physical and sexual abuse; losing a parent to divorce, abandonment, or death; witnessing a parent endure abuse; having a family member in prison; neglect; and living with an alcoholic, drug addict or someone who is depressed or suffers from other mental illness. Further ACEs research found that these types of toxic stress could affect brain development and fundamentally change our genes, which are passed down to future generations. […]

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  316. […] “Adverse Childhood Experiences in Tennessee” was released May 26. It balances the prevalence of ACEs with a message of resiliency and hope.  In bold type, it leads with “Facts NOT Fate,” stating, “Like a house’s foundation, brain architecture is built over time and from the bottom up. Positive experiences in infancy and early childhood can build a strong and solid foundation. Negative experience weaken the foundation which can lead to life-log problems.” (For more background about ACEs, go to ACEs 101.) […]

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  323. […] The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is one of the largest investigations ever conducted to assess associations between childhood traumas and later-life health and well-being, including relationship and marriage problems. ACEs are adverse childhood experiences that harm children’s developing brains so profoundly that the effects show up decades later. […]

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  327. You wrote, “the brain is plastic, and the body wants to heal.” One of the best days of my life was when I learned the word “neuroplasticity”. I was delighted that the brain could heal to the point of recovering from extensive damage.

    My ACES score is 7, however I am living a good, long life because I found healing comfort and recovery in “mindfulness practices, exercise, good nutrition, adequate sleep, and healthy social interactions”.This year, I discovered the “trauma-informed approach”, and am working on putting it into words to explain on my blog.

    I look forward to digging into the great heap of links that you shared with us. Thanks.

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  332. I am leaving Jan 1 to travel for three months across the USA to interview resilient people. I have a survey monkey too that is going out around the world. I’m using the ACES question as part of the research. If any of your readers would like to answer the survey, it will be avail at http://www.drjenniferaustinleigh.com Wednesday, Dec. 17th. I am passionate about helping adults and children learn to bounce back.

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    • I would like to participate in your study Jennifer. My ACE score is 9, and I am 36. The more I read, the more I realize why some of the things present in my life are happening. I must have a high resiliency score because I am a relatively successful adult. That being said I am dealing with substantial emotional and physical issues that seem to be for no reason. I know you posted quite a long time ago, but I am seeking help for myself and others. Please contact me at coachdrichard@yahoo.com.

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    • I hope you were able to go to Arkansas. Our States’ ACE’s scores are all too prevalent. There is so much poverty especially in the Southern most areas of the State. The incidents of incest are very high, as is Schizophrenia, and AIDS continues to kill young mothers. The ACE’s test is profound in its predictions. I’d like to see the lives of the impoverished change forever. Poverty is the Enemy.
      Thank you for your work…its going to take more than a village to change all these lives.
      gigi

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