A difficult childhood
reduces life expectancy by up to 20
years according to a study published in the
American
Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study found that participants who were
exposed to more then five different types of
adverse childhood experiences
(ACEs) were over 50 percent more likely to die during the 10-year period of the
study. On the other hand, people who reported fewer than six ACEs did not have
a statistically increased risk of death compared with the control group.
Listen to a podcast Adversce Childhood Experiences and the Risk of Premature Mortality.
To explore the effect that childhood trauma could have on
life span, Kaiser Permanente mailed questionnaires to adults who were 18 years
and older, and who had visited the Kaiser clinic in San Diego from 1995 to
1997. Overall, the study subjects were middle-class and had good health
coverage. Of those surveyed, 75 percent were white, 11 percent Latino, 7
percent Asian, and 5 percent African-American. They’re educated: 75 percent
attended college and 40 percent have a basic or higher college education. When
they filled out the questionnaire, their average age was 57. Most of them had
jobs. Half were women, half were men.
The participants were asked about their
exposure to eight categories of abuse or dysfunction based on previous Kaiser
studies. One third of the 17,337 participants who replied to the questionnaires
had an ACE score of zero, meaning they had not been exposed to any of the eight
types of abuse or household dysfunction. The majority of the remaining responders
registered a score of between one and four, whereas about 8 percent of the
scoring participants were rated five, and roughly three percent, six to eight.
During the next decade, the study authors, kept records of
which of the 17,337 participants passed away by matching identifying
information such as Social Security numbers from the questionnaire with data
from the National Death Index. In total 1,539 of the participants died during
the follow-up period. When the increased number of deaths in those subjects
with an ACE score of six or greater was compared with the control group, their
mortality risk was 1.5 times higher than for people whose childhoods had been
free of all eight types of abuse. They lost about 20 years from their lives,
living to 60.6 years on average, whereas the average age of death for the
control group was 79.1.
It is unclear why the authors saw more death ages during the
10-year period only for the group with an ACE score of six or greater. Previous
studies by these authors found that the risk of chronic illnesses, such as
heart disease, lung disease and cancer, was greater only for people with these
high ACE scores. In contrast, the risk of substance abuse and suicide increased
stepwise from low to high scores. The authors found that ACE-related health
risks, namely mental illness, social problems and prescription medication use,
accounted for about 30 percent of the 50 percent greater risk of death seen in
this population. "As would be expected, the documented ACE-related conditions
among participants appear to account for some, although not all, of the
increased risk of premature death observed in the current study," wrote David Brown, an epidemiologist at the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and lead author of the study.