Saw this great article by Jenny Anderson in Quartz this morning. Here are some excerpts (and thanks for sharing such great stuff Robin Cogan).
The study used surveys taken by 350 Philadelphia parents who answered questions about their own “ACEs” as well as questions about their children’s health, health behaviors—like eating fruits and vegetables and getting exercise—and health-care access. The respondents were overwhelmingly female (80%), and 45% were African-American. The results held when the authors controlled for income and education. (The survey was part of two larger surveys: the Southeastern Pennsylvania Household Health Survey, and the Philadelphia ACE survey.)
The data revealed a shocking history of abuse and neglect: Overall, 85% of parents in the survey had experienced at least one ACE (with the expanded definition), and 18% had experienced more than six. The parent-child pairs were all from Philadelphia, where one-quarter of residents live in poverty.
Specifically, of the parents surveyed:
- Nearly 42% said they’d witnessed violence, such as seeing someone shot, stabbed or beaten, as a child
- 38% said they lived with a problem drinker or someone who used drugs during their youth
- About 37% said that they had been physically abused as children
Lê-Scherban says the study—which does not show causation, only association—shows how strong the link between trauma and long-term negative health outcomes might be. The more ACEs a parent had suffered as a child, the more likely their own children were to have poorer health status. Particularly worrying, she said in an interview, was the fact that having asthma and poor health as a child are a strong predictors of having them into adulthood, which in turn predict higher mortality rates.
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