A new UC San Francisco report on an understudied population – older homeless adults – reveals that adverse childhood experiences have long-lasting effects. The researchers found that childhood adversities, such as abuse, neglect and parental death, have a strong association with mental health outcomes in a group of 350 homeless adults over the age of 50 in Oakland, Calif. The results indicate that early life challenges have a persistent ripple effect, even in an already challenged population.
“One might think that with all the negative experiences in the lives of these individuals, events that happened fifty years ago would not drive mental health outcomes, but they do,” said UCSF’s Margot Kushel, MD, professor of medicine and senior author on the study, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry on Aug. 17, 2016.
[For more of this story go to https://scienceblog.com/487224...der-homeless-adults/]
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