NEWSWEEK.COM 27
weight loss began to stick. Within a couple years, the program was so
successful that Felitti was receiving regular invitations to speak about
his program to medical audiences. Whenever he brought up sexual
abuse and its apparent link to obesity, however, audience members
would “storm explosively” out of the room or stand up to argue with
him, he says. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to hear what he had to say.
At least one person was intrigued by his findings. Robert Anda,
a researcher at U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), had been
studying chronic diseases and the counterintuitive links between
depression, hope and heart attacks. He knew firsthand what it
was like to deal with colleagues who considered his work flaky.
Anda and Felitti got to talking. They realized there was only one
way that both of them would be able to overcome the skepticism
they were encountering: they needed to do a rigorous study. At
Anda’s urging, Felitti agreed not just to recruit a larger sample but
to expand its scope to examine the link between a wide array of
common childhood stressors and health later in life.
This became the ground-breaking “ACE Study,” a 17,000-per-
son retrospective project aimed at examining the relationship
between childhood exposure to emotional, physical and sexu-
al abuse and household dysfunction, and risky behaviors and
disease in adulthood. Starting in 1998, and continuing with fol-
low-ups well into the 2000s, Felitti and Anda’s team published a
series of counterintuitive papers that upended much of what we
thought we knew about the mind-body connection.
To gather the data, Felitti persuaded Kaiser Permanente-affili-
ated doctors to recruit patients in Southern California undergo-
ing routine physical exams. The patients were asked to complete
confidential surveys detailing both their current health status
and behaviors, and the types of adversity they’ve endured: phys-
ical, emotional and sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence,
parental incarceration, separation or divorce, family mental ill-
ness, the early death of a parent, alcoholism and drug abuse. To
analyze the data, the researchers added up the number of ACEs,
calculated an “ACE score,” then correlated those scores with high-
risk behaviors and diseases to see if they could find any patterns.
The first shocker was just how common these ACEs were.
More than half of those participating had at least one, a quarter
had two or more and roughly 6 percent reported four or more.
This was not just a problem of the poor. Childhood emotional
adversity cut across all racial, ethnic and economic lines. Even
more surprising was the impact of these stressors later in life.
When the researchers ran their analysis, they discovered a direct,
dose-dependent link between the number of ACEs and behavior-
al issues like alcoholism, smoking and promiscuity—those who
had experienced four or more categories of childhood exposure
had a four- to 12-fold increased risk of alcoholism, drug abuse,
depression and suicide attempts.
The results went beyond these common trauma-related healthThe ground-breaking ACE
study found a direct, dose-
dependent link between
childhood exposure
to emotional, physical
and sexual abuse and
household dysfunction,
and behavioral issues
li ke alcoholism, smoking
and promiscuity later in
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