Regular articleThe impact of adverse childhood experiences on health problems: evidence from four birth cohorts dating back to 1900
Section snippets
Methods
The ACE Study is a collaboration between Kaiser Permanente's Health Appraisal Center (HAC) in San Diego, California, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The ACE Study was approved by the institutional review boards of Kaiser Permanente, Emory University, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Potential participants were sent letters that accompanied the ACE Study questionnaire informing them that their participation was voluntary and their answers would held
Characteristics of study population
The study population included 9367 women (54%) and 7970 men (46%). The mean age (standard deviation) was 56 (15.2) years. Seventy-five percent of participants were white, 39% were college graduates, 36% had some college education, and 18% were high school graduates. Only 7% had not graduated from high school.
Adverse childhood experiences
The prevalence of each individual ACE and of the ACE scores is shown in Table 1. Women were more likely than men to report ACEs, with exception of physical abuse (Table 1). Sixty-four
Discussion
The risk of depressed affect, suicide attempts, multiple sexual partners, sexually transmitted diseases, ever smoking cigarettes, and alcoholism increased in a graded manner as the ACE score increased in each of four successive birth cohorts from 1900 to 1978. Furthermore, the strength of these graded relationships did not differ substantially or in a statistically significant manner between successive birth cohorts. The difference in the overall prevalence for health behaviors observed in each
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