What Is Your ACE Score?

I'm sure that title probably made you ask the following question.  "What is an ACE Score?"   Glad you asked!  ACE stands for adverse childhood experience.  The score attempts to determine how many adverse experiences an individual has had in their childhood because the higher the score, the greater the risk of having some serious health conditions later in life.

While most humans wait until these conditions show up and then want medications to fix the health condition, few realize just how much impact these early experiences had upon our life.  If we realize the impact they had upon our life, we are often led to believe there is little we can do about them now, short of taking medications and going through medical procedures.  However, this is not necessarily the case.

It does not require that you have been through horrendous trauma as a child because at the end of the day, trauma is trauma.  Yes, the more you have to deal with from childhood, the more difficult the challenge to overcome it.  We've all got something in our past most likely and instead of looking at it as a badge of honor or something to run away from, we should learn how to deal with it in our life.


The ACE study brought together science with somatic reality.  It clearly demonstrated that if you have adverse conditions, you are more likely to develop serious health conditions later in life.  Again, just because this has happened to you, it does not mean you can not change the course of you life in the future.  Health conditions do not need to be a cause and effect relationship.

In the study, there was a 24% prevalence of sexual abuse in women and 16% in men.  While there was almost an equal result in physical abuse among men and women, there was higher prevalence in women of emotional abuse at 13.1% versus men at 7.6%.

Overall, neglect showed up as emotional neglect in 14.8% while physical neglect showed up in 9.9%.  Neglect such as emotional was deemed to be how little the child felt loved and supported in the family.  Physical neglect dealt more with the child being fed and their physical needs being met.

Some of the health conditions that result from a higher ACE score include liver disease, ischemic heart disease, COPD, depression, suicide, and substance abuse.  Remember that the higher the ACE score, the greater the risk of these health conditions showing up later in life.

If you read the following page, ACE Score Affects The Physical Mind And Body, you will see all the other information on this as well as reference sources.  There is a place on the page to calculate your own ACE score.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 4/21/13 by Don Shetterly

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