The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity—A Transformative Guide to Understanding Childhood Trauma and Health

by Nadine Burke Harris

The body of research sparked by the ACE Study makes it clear that adverse childhood experiences in and of themselves are a risk factor for many of the most common and serious diseases in the United States (and worldwide), regardless of income or race or access to care.

A person with an ACE score of seven or more has triple the lifetime odds of getting lung cancer and three and a half times the odds of having ischemic heart disease, the number one killer in the United States.

Toxic stress response can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as physical or emotional abuse, neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence, and/or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support. This kind of prolonged activation of the stress-response systems can disrupt the development of brain architecture and other organ systems, and increase the risk for stress-related disease and cognitive impairment, well into the adult years.

Further work by researchers Aoife O’Donovan and Thomas Neylan compared the telomeres of people with PTSD with the telomeres of people in good mental health. What they found was that overall, those with PTSD had shorter telomeres than those in the control group. However, what was really interesting was that the people with PTSD who did not have early childhood adversity didn’t tend to have shorter telomeres.