Not long after she finished her medical residency at Stanford University about a decade ago, Nadine Burke Harris got to work as a pediatrician in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco. She founded and became CEO of a clinic there, focused on addressing health disparities in the community.
It was in talking with those children and their families, she says, that she first realized how many of her patients experiencing the worst health outcomes — those with the highest levels of chronic asthma, for example — were also living with significant adversity, such as growing up in a household where a parent was mentally ill, abusive or substance dependent.
Eventually, those conversations led her to the expanding research on adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, and their profound, lifelong health effects. The term "ACEs" has been used since the 1990s to describe the abuse, neglect and other potentially traumatic experiences estimated to afflict more than 34 million U.S. children under 18.
[For more on this story, written by NPR, go to: https://www.npr.org/sections/h...-childhood-adversity]
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