In the report "Making the Case for Linking Community Development and Health: a resource for those working to improve low-income communities and the lives of people in them" by the Center for Social Disparities in Health, Build Healthy Places, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the effects of toxic stress on health outcomes was mentioned as supporting evidence for improving the built environment of communities. It's always exciting to see cross-sector collaboration and even better when it includes relevant information on trauma and resilience.
The segment that mentions toxic stress is included below:
"The combined effects of harmful neighborhood conditions and other adverse experiences can produce chronic (meaning persistent) stress in childhood that can overwhelm a child’s ability to cope.104,105,106,107 This is sometimes referred to as “toxic stress.”108
A growing body of research demonstrates how toxic stress can get “under the skin”, leading to poorer health outcomes later in life. While many chronic conditions do not manifest until adulthood, researchers have identified substances detectable in laboratory tests that indicate elevated risk for chronic disease within children who experience toxic stress.109,110,111,112,113,114 Researchers have also observed differences in brain development and behavior that reflect impaired cognitive and emotional development among children who experience toxic stress and have found that affected children are more likely to engage in risky health behaviors.115,116,117
Many children who live below the federal poverty line live in high-poverty, low-opportunity neighborhoods. A 2015 journal article explains how the community development sector can be a key partner in improving the health of the one out of five children who live in poverty (and the one out of three Latino and African American children who live in poverty) by improving neighborhood conditions.118,119 To illustrate these modifiable neighborhood level factors that shape health and social mobility, Dolores Acevedo-Garcia and colleagues developed the Child Opportunity Index, a tool that calculates the positive and negative neighborhood influences on children’s well-being for the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S.120 The Child Opportunity Index shows that Black and Latino children are much more likely than White children to grow up in low-opportunity communities."
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