Overview
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are events or situations experienced by minors that could potentially have caused trauma or other lingering effects that impact one’s health and wellbeing.
The 10 core types of ACEs currently used are physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, intimate partner violence, household substance misuse, household mental illness, parental separation or divorce, and incarcerated household member.
History and Etymology
While the concept of childhood trauma is an old one, the exact term “Adverse Childhood Experience” was coined by a CDC-Kaiser study in 1998 that surveyed over 17,000 adults found that nearly two-thirds had at least one ACE, which dramatically changed the assumption among many medical practitioners that trauma with lasting health impacts was rare. The idea to measure ACEs started in 1985 at a Kaiser Permanente obesity clinic where Dr. Vincent Felitti observed that the majority of patients who rapidly regained the weight they dropped had experiences severe childhood abuse, suggesting that eating habits were linked to coping mechanisms that provided safety, comfort, and/or relief. Studies have since showed that an increase in ACE scores is correlated with a drastic increase in the risk of developing chronic disease as an adult.
The 10 ACE types above are directly lifted from the CDC-Kaiser study from 1998, so some modern frameworks have tried to expand ACEs to include systemic issues and community trauma, like racism, bullying, and economic hardship. The original 17,000 adults surveyed were mostly middle-class Americans with education and health insurance.