ArticleDeutsches Arzteblatt international2019
The Prevalence and Consequences of Adverse Childhood Experiences in the German Population.
Article in Deutsches Arzteblatt international, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
59 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 131 citations in OpenAlex.
- Health and financial costs of adverse childhood experiences in 28 European countries: a systematic review and meta-analysis.The Lancet. Public health · 2021Pooled it
- Measures matter: assessing childhood maltreatment and emotion dysregulation in a transdiagnostic sample.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- Growing in the Shadow of Mental Illness: Quality of Life, Health Status, Social Functioning, and Health Care Utilization Among Adults to Parents With Severe Mental Illness.Journal of nursing scholarship : an official publication of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing · 2026Article
- Bullying as an Adverse Childhood Experience?-State of the Art.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Experiences in close relationships, interpersonal trust and OXTR expression in individuals with childhood maltreatment.Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation · 2026Article
- Associations between online child sexual solicitation and abuse and offline child maltreatment: A latent class analysis.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- Early care in childhood and psychological burden among East and West German adults.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Echoes of childhood trauma: the relationship between adverse childhood experiences, brain structure, and mental health in aging adults.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Prevalence and profiles of adverse childhood experiences: a French nationwide study using the CONSTANCES cohort.BMJ public health · 2026Article
- Caregiver adverse childhood experiences and burden: associations with child welfare risk in a caregiver-child-sample.Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- The long-term impact of adverse childhood experiences on externalizing aggressiveness: sensitive periods during childhood and adolescence.Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry · 2026Article
- Adverse childhood experiences, psychological distress, and the role of locus of control.Frontiers in epidemiology · 2026Article
- The role of perinatal perceived stress in the setting of adverse childhood experience and perinatal anxiety and depressive symptoms.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- The Legacy of Adversity? The Impact of Caregivers' Childhood Experiences and Children's Mental Health on Family Dynamics and Perceived Burden During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Parental Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in an Early Childhood Mental Health Outpatient Clinic in Germany: Prevalence and Associations with Child Psychiatric Diagnoses.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Sex-specific differences in the experience of adverse childhood experiences: transmission, protective, and risk factors from the perspectives of parents and their children-results of an 18-year German longitudinal study.Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health · 2025Article
- Mental health of university students twenty months after the beginning of the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war.BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- Maternal child maltreatment and trajectories of offspring behavioural and emotional difficulties from age 4 to 7 years - results from a prospective birth cohort study.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2025Article
- Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) dimensions mediate the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and adult aggression depending on cognitive reappraisal.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Patterns of Adverse Childhood Experiences from a Longitudinal South African Community Sample: A Latent Class Analysis.International journal on child maltreatment : research, policy and practice · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundMultiple studies have shown a link between cumulative adverse experiences in childhood and a wide variety of psychosocial problems in later life. There have not been any pertinent representative studies of the German population until now. The goal of this study is to determine the frequency of adverse childhood experiences (ACE), the extent to which they manifest themselves in patterns of co-occurrence, and their possible connection to psychosocial abnormalities in the German population.
methods2531 persons (55.4% female) aged 14 years and up (mean [M] = 48.6 years, standard deviation [SD] = 18) were retro- spectively studied for ACE and psychosocial abnormalities by means of the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 (PHQ-4) and further questions on aggressiveness and life satisfaction. The frequency of ACE and their cumulative occurrence were analyzed in de- scriptive terms. Patterns of simultaneously occurring types of ACE were studied with latent class analysis. Associations between ACE and psychosocial abnormalities were tested with logistic regression analyses.
results43.7% of the respondents reported at least one ACE; 8.9% reported four or more. The most commonly reported ones were parental separation and divorce (19.4%), alcohol consumption and drug abuse in the family (16.7%), emotional neglect (13.4%), and emotional abuse (12.5%). Four ACE patterns were identified by latent class analysis: no/minimal ACE, household dysfunction, child maltreatment, and multiple ACE. In the cumulative model, the high-risk group with four or more ACE displayed a significantly elevated risk for depressiveness (odds ratio [OR] = 7.8), anxiety (OR = 7.1), physical aggressiveness (OR = 10.5), and impaired life satisfaction (OR = 5.1).
conclusionAdverse childhood experiences are common, and their cumulation is associated with markedly increased negative sequelae for the affected persons. Preventive approaches are needed that extend beyond the area of child maltreatment alone and address other problems in the parental home, such as mental illness in the parents. Data acquisition by self-reporting is a limitation of this study.
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