Can Childhood Stress Affect Your Health as an Adult?

Something that happened during childhood may have occurred decades ago. But that doesn't necessarily mean its effects ended when the event was over.

Research into Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, has helped change the way we understand the relationship between childhood stress and health later in life.

For me, it also raises an important question when someone is dealing with a chronic, recurring or difficult-to-explain health problem:

“What was happening in your life when your health began to change?”

Adverse Childhood Experiences, commonly called ACEs, are potentially traumatic experiences that occur during childhood, from birth through age 17.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), examples can include:

• Experiencing violence, abuse or neglect
• Witnessing violence in the home or community
• Having a family member attempt or die by suicide
• Growing up in a household affected by substance-use problems
• Growing up around mental-health problems
• Instability caused by parental separation
• Having a household member who is incarcerated

The important thing to understand is that these examples are not a complete list of experiences that may be stressful or traumatic to a child.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — About Adverse Childhood Experiences

The original ACE research studied specific categories of childhood adversity. Those categories gave researchers a way to measure childhood experiences and compare them with health outcomes later in life.

But they were never a complete inventory of everything a child could experience as stressful.

The CDC today specifically notes that its examples of ACEs are not a complete list of adverse experiences.

That distinction matters.

A child's brain doesn't necessarily interpret an experience the same way an adult does.

A move. A frightening medical experience. The loss of someone important. Major changes within the family. The arrival of a new sibling. Separation from someone the child depends upon. Conflict in the home. A frightening accident. Or other significant changes in a child's environment may be experienced very differently by that child than an adult might expect.

It does mean that when I'm talking with patients, I'm interested in the person's whole story—not simply whether an experience appears on an ACE questionnaire.

The landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences Study was published in 1998.

Researchers examined information from 9,508 adults and compared exposure to different categories of childhood abuse and household dysfunction with health behaviors, health status and disease later in adulthood.

More than half of the participants reported at least one category of childhood exposure.

The researchers found what is known as a graded relationship:

The study found relationships involving areas such as depression, suicide attempts, substance abuse, smoking, poor self-rated health, physical inactivity and several adult diseases.

This research did not establish that childhood adversity automatically causes a particular disease in a particular person.

What it demonstrated was an important relationship between the amount of childhood adversity experienced and health risks later in life.

Source: Felitti VJ, Anda RF, et al. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 1998

Your brain and nervous system are constantly receiving information about what is happening around you and helping your body respond and adapt.

That includes your response to stress.

During childhood, the brain and many of the systems involved in responding to the environment are still developing.

The CDC reports that toxic stress—extended or prolonged stress associated with ACEs—can negatively affect brain development, the immune system and stress-response systems.

Those effects aren't limited to how someone feels emotionally.

They can influence how a person responds to stress, learns, pays attention and makes decisions.

This is one of the reasons I don't view significant childhood stress as something that necessarily belongs only in someone's past.

What happens to us emotionally can have physical effects.

Stress itself isn't automatically bad.

Short-term stress is normal.

When something threatening happens, your brain and nervous system need to recognize it and help your body respond appropriately.

When the stressful situation has passed, the system should be able to move away from that heightened response and toward rest and recovery.

Long-term stress is different.

When stressful situations continue, occur repeatedly, or overwhelm a person's ability to adapt, the body's stress-response systems may remain activated differently than they would during a short-term event.

During childhood, that distinction can be especially important because the brain, nervous system and other body systems are still developing.

One particularly interesting area of research involves childhood traumatic stress and autoimmune disease later in adulthood.

A 2009 study published in Psychosomatic Medicine examined 15,357 adults who participated in the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.

Researchers looked at cumulative childhood traumatic stress and later hospitalization involving autoimmune diseases.

Compared with people who reported no ACEs, participants reporting two or more ACEs had approximately:

The researchers concluded that childhood traumatic stress was associated with an increased likelihood of hospitalization with a diagnosed autoimmune disease decades later.

That is a significant finding.

It does not mean that childhood stress is the sole cause of autoimmune disease, nor does it mean that someone with childhood adversity will develop an autoimmune condition.

It does demonstrate an important association between cumulative childhood traumatic stress and autoimmune-related health outcomes later in adulthood.

Source: Dube SR, et al. Psychosomatic Medicine. 2009

When someone comes into my office with a chronic, recurring or difficult-to-explain health problem, I don't only want to know:

“Where does it hurt?”

I also want to know:

• When did this begin?
• What was happening in your life at the time?
• Was there an accident?
• A loss?
• A major family change?
• An illness?
• A difficult relationship?
• A frightening experience?
• A period of long-term stress?
• Did several stressful things happen close together?

Sometimes patients have never considered that part of their history relevant to what they're experiencing physically.

But knowing what we now know about the relationship between stress, the brain, nervous system, immune system and physical health, I believe those are questions worth asking.

Want to Understand More About the Brain-Body Connection?

Learn how short-term and long-term stress can affect the brain, nervous system and physical health.

My interest in this relationship between stress and physical health is one of the reasons Quantum Neuro Reset Therapy (QNRT) became part of my practice.

QNRT is a neurologically based approach I use to look for brain imbalances and stress patterns that may still be relevant to how a patient is responding today.

The goal isn't to erase the past or pretend that stressful experiences didn't happen.

The QNRT framework looks at how the brain and nervous system are responding to those experiences and uses specific neurological evaluation and stimulation as part of the reset process.

For some of the people I see, exploring this part of their history provides another way of looking at a problem they've been trying to understand for a long time.

Reading about ACEs can sometimes make people uncomfortable.

Someone may look at their own childhood and begin wondering:

“Does this mean something that happened to me years ago determines my health today?”

ACEs are risk factors—not destiny.

Research showing an association between childhood adversity and later health problems describes patterns seen across groups of people. An ACE score doesn't diagnose the cause of an individual's health problem, and it doesn't determine what will happen to that person in the future.

Your history is information.

It can be another part of understanding your health story.

And sometimes asking different questions can help us look at that story differently.

If you've been dealing with chronic, recurring or difficult-to-explain health problems, there may be value in looking beyond where it hurts.

Dr. Tony Fry has been practicing in Harrisburg, Illinois since 1997, serving patients from Southern Illinois and the surrounding region. He uses QNRT along with other approaches at Inspire Health & Wellness.

If you're interested in QNRT or aren't sure which type of care is appropriate, start with a Comprehensive New Patient appointment.

Inspire Health & Wellness

200 East Poplar Street, Harrisburg, IL 62946