A recent study conducted in the UK, led by University of Pittsburgh psychology professor and neuroscientist Jamie Hanson, further highlights the connection between childhood adversity and poor health outcomes later in life — specifically, increased risks of negative COVID-19 outcomes like hospitalization and death.
The study, involving approximately 151,000 midlife adults, examined self-reported childhood adversity data connected to national health records, where childhood adversity encompassed physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and neglect, among other stressors.
"As people reported greater and greater levels of adversity, they were about 20% more likely to have a really negative outcome from COVID,” Hanson explained.
Hanson pointed to two main outcomes of childhood adversity — alterations in inflammation and poor immune response — as the potential catalysts for COVID complications in individuals with higher reports of trauma. He also mentioned stress, specifically rooted in childhood, as a main research point for further study. He said further research will be conducted surrounding the health issues caused by childhood adversity and how they result in COVID complications.
Kathy Szafran, executive director for Mountain Health Promise at Aetna and president and co-founder of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Coalition of West Virginia, supports the study's findings. As a licensed therapist and expert in childhood adversity, she said the findings did not surprise her.
According to Szafran, higher levels of childhood trauma have been proven already to correlate with increased health risks and service utilization in adulthood.
“Those with higher ACEs scores utilize health care services more and have a higher incidence of assorted health risks,” said Szafran. “That includes heart disease, diabetes, obesity, addiction, etc.”
Szafran said loneliness, especially, could potentially be a logical catalyst for negative COVID outcomes in populations that suffered a lot as kids.
“During Covid, we lost our connections with so many people in our world,” said Szafran. “That was so much stress on everyone during that time period, so you can very easily see that that would be a trigger for folks who have higher ACEs scores.”
Hanson and Szafran both emphasized that the physical health impacts of childhood adversity are not only substantial but also often overlooked by healthcare systems.
"The physical health impacts are pretty large and staggering,” said Hanson. “Many physicians and health systems don't think about these kinds of large social determinants of health and developmental origins."
Szafran encourages a trauma-informed approach across various sectors, including schools, workplaces, and healthcare.
“Instead of saying, ‘What's wrong with you?’” Szafran explained, “I say, ‘What happened to you?’”
