“As the ACE study has shown, child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk

The ACE (adverse childhood experiences) study measuring them is found on a great site about ACE titled ACEs Too High News. This post includes links to some of the main posts on this site.

(1)  What’s Your ACE score? (and, at the end, What’s Your Resilience Score?)

There are 10 types of childhood trauma measured in the ACE Study. Five are personal — physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect. Five are related to other family members: a parent who’s an alcoholic, a mother who’s a victim of domestic violence, a family member in jail, a family member diagnosed with a mental illness, and the disappearance of a parent through divorce, death or abandonment. Each type of trauma counts as one. So a person who’s been physically abused, with one alcoholic parent, and a mother who was beaten up has an ACE score of three.

(2)  The single best medical appointment of my life was when a nurse practitioner asked about my adverse childhood experiences (ACEs):

The higher a person’s ACE score, the greater the risk of chronic disease and mental illness. For example, compared with someone who has an ACE score of zero, a person with an ACE score of 4 or more is twice as likely to have heart disease, seven times more likely to be alcoholic and 12 times more likely to attempt suicide. Of the 17,000 mostly white, college-educated people with jobs and great health care who participated in the study, 64 percent had an ACE score of 1 or more; 40 percent had 2 or more and 12 percent had an ACE score of 4 or more (i.e., four out of the 10 different types of adversity).

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) contribute to most of our major chronic health, mental health, economic health and social health issues.

(3)  A working ranch integrates ACEs and animals into treatment for teens:

Although it’s too soon to tell if integrating trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) sciences is making a difference for the teens living at Home on the Range, a residential treatment center in Sentinel Butte, ND, it’s made a huge difference for the people who work there. They now understand that kids aren’t born bad.

“ACEs has enlightened us,” says Mike Gooch, clinical program director for the center, which is located on a 1,600-acre cattle ranch. “We knew kids had trauma, and once we administered ACEs, it all started to make sense. They’re not really born a certain way.”

Indeed, it’s what happens after these kids are born, as their average ACE score of 5 indicates.

(4)  Which version is your kid’s school?:

We’ve done stories about schools that have incorporated practices based on the science of adverse childhood experiences. This science includes who suffers and the consequences (the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and other epidemiological studies), the effects of toxic stress that these experiences have on a child’s brain and body, how the consequences of these experiences can be passed from generation to generation, and the resilience research that shows our brains are plastic and our bodies want to heal.

Photo credit.