Why are ACE scores important?

The ACE Score captures the cumulative negative impact on social, emotional and cognitive development, and other impairments in the function of brain and body systems. These impairments are the biologic pathways to health risks, disability, disease, and early mortality.

Why is it important to know your ACE score?

An ACE score is a tally of different types of abuse, neglect, and other adverse childhood experiences. A higher score indicates a higher risk for health problems later in life.

What is the purpose of ACE assessment?

The purpose of a complete ACE screening is to rapidly identify which patients are at highest risk for toxic stress and perform the next steps of a more complete, individualized assessment for each of them. A complete ACE screening involves assessing for the triad of: Adversity (the ACE score)

How does your ACE score affect you?

The higher your ACE score, the higher the likelihood of developing long-term health problems like heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes.

What are the long term effects of ACE scores?

ACEs are linked to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance misuse in adulthood. However, ACEs can be prevented. Preventing ACEs can help children and adults thrive and potentially: Lower risk for conditions like depression, asthma, cancer, and diabetes in adulthood.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): Impact on brain, body and behaviour

What is the most common ACE score?

Prevalence of ACEs. In total, the majority of individuals experienced at least one adverse experience (57.8%). Approximately 42% had an ACE score of 0, followed by 22.9% (1 ACE), 12.8% (2 ACEs), 8.2% (3 ACEs), 5.7% (4 ACEs), 3.8% (5 ACEs), 2.3% (6 ACEs), 1.2% (7 ACEs), and 0.3% (all 8 ACEs; not shown in tables).

What are the benefits of ACE questionnaire?

Using the ACE Questionnaire

The questionnaire helps researchers and mental health professionals identify childhood abuse and neglect and family dysfunction such as domestic violence, incarceration, and alcohol and drug issues.

What is the significance of an ACE score How does it affect education?

ACEs can affect student learning and behavior in the classroom. Children with three or more ACEs are 5x more likely to have attendance issues, 6x times more likely to have behavior problems, and 3x times more likely to experience academic failure.

How does ACE affect cognitive development?

Exposure to ACEs can disrupt child development, resulting in cognitive, social, emotional and behaviour deficits. As a result, ACEs can lead to poor outcomes across the life course, effecting physical and mental health and leading to the adoption of health harming behaviours (e.g. alcohol and drug use).

What are some facts about high ACE scores?

People with high ACE scores are more likely to be violent, to have more marriages, more broken bones, more drug prescriptions, more depression, and more autoimmune diseases. People with an ACE score of 6 or higher are at risk of their lifespan being shortened by 20 years.

How ACEs affect child development?

Toxic stress from ACEs can negatively affect children's brain development, immune systems, and stress-response systems. These changes can affect children's attention, decision-making, and learning. Children growing up with toxic stress may have difficulty forming healthy and stable relationships.

What mental illness is caused by childhood trauma?

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Children and adolescents with PTSD have symptoms such as persistent, frightening thoughts and memories or flashbacks of a traumatic event or events.

What childhood trauma looks like in adults?

What does childhood trauma in adults look like? Childhood trauma in adults can impact experiences and relationships with others due to experienced feelings of shame and guilt. Childhood trauma in adults also results in feeling disconnected, and being unable to relate to others.

How do you know if you have unresolved childhood trauma?

Unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, relationship problems and physical symptoms like headaches or nausea are some of the ways that unresolved trauma can manifest, according to the American Psychological Association.

What does childhood trauma cause later in life?

Focus Area. Trauma and adversity in childhood raise the risk of numerous health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and mental illness in adulthood.

How do ACEs affect attachment?

Just like attachment, experiencing ACEs can have an impact on our future physical and mental health, and often ACEs can be barriers to healthy attachment relationships forming for children.

How is a child's brain affected by ACE?

Recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies suggest that the higher an individual's ACE score, the less gray matter she or he has in other key areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, an area related to decision-making and self-regulatory skills, and the amygdala, or fear-processing center.

Which children are most likely to experience ACEs?

Parental separation and economic hardship are the most common ACEs regardless of race and ethnicity, though children of different races and ethnicities do not experience ACEs equally. National percentages of children experiencing at least one ACE include: 61 percent non-Hispanic Black children.

What ACE score is concerning?

If the ACE score is 1-3 with ACE-Associated Health Conditions, the patient is at “intermediate risk.” If the ACE score is 4 or higher, even without ACE- Associated Health Conditions, the patient is at “high risk” for toxic stress physiology.

How do you recover from a high ACE score?

Active mindfulness techniques, such as those practiced during yoga, have been found to restore balance to the fight or flight response, which is often working overtime in the brains of people with ACEs. This can lower anxiety and depression and decrease the need for destructive coping mechanisms.

What risk behaviors are seen with higher ACE scores?

Indeed, adults with a history of exposure to four or more ACEs, compared to those with no ACEs, are more likely to smoke, abuse alcohol, use illicit drugs, and engage in risky sexual behavior, and there appears to be a dose-response effect (Dube et al., 2003; Felitti et al., 1998; Strine et al., 2012).

What factors can cause a high ACEs score?

An ACE score is calculated by adding up 10 specific types of childhood trauma. These experiences include physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect.

Do ACEs affect life expectancy?

On average, the life expectancy for someone with an ACE score of four or more is 20 years shorter than someone who scored zero. Learn more about ACEs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Does a higher ACEs score contribute to higher life expectancy rates?

People with six or more ACEs died nearly 20 years earlier on average than those without ACEs (60.6 years, 95% CI=56.2, 65.1, vs 79.1 years, 95% CI=78.4, 79.9). Average YLL per death was nearly three times greater among people with six or more ACEs (25.2 years) than those without ACEs (9.2 years).

Could higher ACE scores indicate a higher possibility of addiction?

According to ACE studies, about 64% of people have at least one ACE, which can double to quadruple the likelihood of using drugs or alcohol, particularly at an early age. Having an ACE score of 4 nearly doubles the risk of heart disease and lung cancer and increases the likelihood of becoming an alcoholic by 700%.