Here are Karen's great notes from our last meeting.
Dear Sonoma County ACES Connection members! Here are notes from today’s meeting. It was such a lively discussion I was not able to capture everything!
We now have a set meeting date, time and location! We will meet the 4th Wed of each month, from 12:30 to 2:00 in the City View Room at Public Health. However, due to Thanksgiving, we will meet one week early on Wed Nov 19thth. Hope to see you there!
Dr. Deirdre Pearl shared that Roseland Pediatrics has been selected to participate in a Johns Hopkins University learning collaborative on trauma informed care in primary pediatrics! Dr. Pearl will share their team’s learnings with our group as they move through this process. Congratulations to Roseland PEDS! We cannot wait to hear more!
Several ACES Connection members had the opportunity to hear Dr. Matthew Pantell present on ACES from a PEDS MD perspective – his presentation included information on telomere length as a biological measure of physiologic stress. His article, Rigor, vigor and the study of health disparities is attached. In this article he digs deeper into how social disadvantage becomes biologically embedded and results in poorer health. He aim was to use statistical analysis to look more deeply at the interconnections across the lifespan.
Jane Stevens gave a demonstration of the https://www.pacesconnection.com/ website. We now have a local group which can be found by going to the site and searching “Sonoma County”. Please go to ACES Connection and join our group! Also, please invite others to join. Through this on-line effort we will begin to weave our group together.
Today’s meeting focused on brainstorming local trauma informed efforts. We started by looking at the Child Welfare system – mapping out services and supports and considering if they might be trauma informed. Your input is still needed! The dialog will continue through a Chat Room on ACES Connection – Sonoma County ACES Connection group. Please sign up and participate. Your voice is important!
Not yet ready to sign up on ACES Connection? You can still email your ideas of any local agencies that utilize trauma informed care models to Karen or Alison. We are also interested in how you may have built in opportunities for mindfulness and other prevention focused activities into your organization and with your staff.
For your reading pleasure, here are several more articles on the association of stress on telomere length:
*Telomeres are like the plastic caps on the end of shoe strings, when they shorten, the DNA starts to fray.
http://www.nature.com/news/str...en-s-genomes-1.14997
Poverty and unstable family environments shorten chromosome-protecting telomeres in nine-year-olds
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brings researchers closer to understanding how social conditions in childhood can influence long-term health, says Elissa Epel, a health psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research.
http://www.iflscience.com/heal...ntly-affect-your-dna
Exposure To Stress As A Child Can Permanently Affect Your DNA
Telomeres are the caps at the end of chromosomes that keep them from shrinking when cells replicate. Shorter telomeres are linked to higher risks for heart disease, obesity, cognitive decline, diabetes, mental illness and poor health outcomes in adulthood.
http://pediatrics.aappublicati...06/10/peds.2013-3415
The Association of Telomere Length With Family Violence and Disruption
Researchers discovered that children in homes affected by domestic violence, suicide or the incarceration of a family member have significantly shorter telomeres, which is a cellular marker of aging, than those in stable households. The findings are published online in the latest issue of the journal Pediatrics.
Copied from attached Shalev 2012 article – a look at the impact of stress and stress reduction:
We also talked about the five protective factors which are the foundation of the Strengthening Families Framework – which is being used by the home visiting programs.
Here are a few additional resources and other related items that came up during our discussion:
Seattle Street Yoga: http://streetyoga.org/youth-yo...ms/seattle-programs/ “Trauma-informed Yoga Training”
The Toolbox curriculum: http://tedxgoldengateed.org/ev...s/workshops/toolbox/
Heart Math Institute: http://www.heartmath.com/institute-of-heartmath/
Apps that support mindfulness and meditation: https://www.headspace.com/headspace-meditation-app
A quick YouTube on how Headspace works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEpOF7vUymc
Hope to see you on ACES Connection!
Karen
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