ACE

ACE scores keep coming to my attention, through the impacts of trauma on people under the age of 18 and the impacts long term on their health.

So, being a do-er I decided to take action. I decided to add an ACE score assessment to my intake form. So we can know, straight away how to support and guide you, if you are in the category where you have adverse childhood events (ACE) in your life.

Having four or more adverse events in your life as a child, put you at greater risk of anxiety, depression, suicide, type 2 diabetes and cancers. just to name a few, but what's most important to me is it also highlights the fact that you're unlikely to have seen an adult in your life as a child actually look after themselves. This means as an adult it can be hard to make, the right choices to look after yourself and to make self-care a priority or important. This is because you haven't seen self-care modelled.

This means that people with a score over 4 are not likely to know how to actually practice self-care. Compliance levels are often low and without actually testing and asking about scores, I don't know what is causing the issues of non-compliance. This is something I understand personally, just between you and I. My ace score is 8. I completely and utterly understand where you're at if you have an ACE score. I wish for a generation with no ACE. I wish for a generation of ACE-less children and that is my goal. That is my mission to support parents with high ACE to make children with no ACEs.

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.

There are, of course, many other types of childhood trauma — watching a sibling being abused, losing a caregiver (grandmother, mother, grandfather, etc.), homelessness, surviving and recovering from a severe accident, witnessing a father being abused by a mother, witnessing a grandmother abusing a father, etc. The ACE Study included only those 10 childhood traumas because those were mentioned as most common by a group of about 300 Kaiser members; those traumas were also well studied individually in the research literature.

The most important thing to remember is that the ACE score is meant as a guideline: If you experienced other types of toxic stress over months or years, then those would likely increase your risk of health consequences.

A great youtube video explaining ACEs can be found here

A TEDtalk From Nadine Burke can be found here

childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. An impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on.