By Richard Morgan, The Washington Post, May 15, 2021
Even with a pandemic raging, Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician who is serving as the first state surgeon general of California, set a goal that had nothing to do with the coronavirus: training 20,000 medical professionals in her state in a kind of health assessment known as the ACEs score.
ACEs stands for adverse childhood experiences. A person’s score is typically a tally of how many of 10 such traumas — specific kinds of abuse, neglect or household challenges — they suffered before the age of 18.
Proponents of the measure, which was developed in the late 1990s, say a patient’s ACEs score is important to know, because adverse childhood experiences can be linked to widespread negative adult health outcomes, such as asthma, cancer, depression, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
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