ArticlePrevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research2023
Childhood Adversity and Midlife Health: Shining a Light on the Black Box of Psychosocial Mechanisms.
Article in Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Associations between adverse childhood experiences and progression to incident psychiatric disorders in older adults: A 22-year cohort study.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Interpersonal adversity and health across the life course.Current opinion in psychology · 2026Review
- Social mobility and parenting: Testing associations in a prospective longitudinal cohort study.Child development · 2026Article
- Article
- The relationships among trauma, stress, social support, and psychopathology: exploring early warning factors of mental illness from a network analysis perspective.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Fortifying Physical and Psychological Wellbeing: Leveraging Capital for Resilience Against Racism and Adversity Across Racial Groups.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2025Article
- The transgenerational cycle of adverse childhood experiences: transmission and familial factors for intervention - first results of an 18-year German longitudinal study.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2025Article
- Associations between adverse childhood experiences and progression to incident psychiatric disorders in older adults: A 22-year cohort study.Research square · 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
- Pathways from Adverse Childhood Family Environment to Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms and Impact Among Women.Journal of women's health (2002) · 2025Article
- The Continuity of Adversity: Negative Emotionality Links Early Life Adversity With Adult Stressful Life Events.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- The association between patterns of exposure to adverse life events and the risk of chronic kidney disease: a prospective cohort study of 140,997 individuals.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Trauma, adversity, and biological aging: behavioral mechanisms relevant to treatment and theory.Translational psychiatry · 2024Review
- Childhood maltreatment and health in the UK Biobank: triangulation of outcome-wide and polygenic risk score analyses.BMC medicine · 2024Article
- Article
- Are adverse childhood experiences associated with trajectories of healthy aging? Evidence from China.SSM - population health · 2023Article
- The Potential for Prevention Science in Middle and Late Adulthood: a Commentary on the Special Issue of Prevention Science.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with poorer health, which has spurred public health efforts to reduce the number of adverse events children experience. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that all ACEs can be prevented. For adults who already experienced ACEs in childhood, what psychological, social, and behavioral intervention targets might reduce risk for negative health outcomes? To provide insight into the "black box" of psychosocial mechanisms linking ACEs to poor health, our study used data from the Dunedin Study, a longitudinal cohort assessed from birth to age 45. Mediation models (N = 859) were used to examine whether candidate psychosocial variables in adulthood explained the association between childhood ACEs and health in midlife. Potential psychosocial mediators included stressful life events, perceived stress, negative emotionality, and health behaviors. Children who experienced more ACEs had poorer health in midlife. They also had significantly more stressful life events, more perceived stress, more negative emotionality, and unhealthier behaviors as adults. These mediators were each independently associated with poorer health in midlife and statistically mediated the association between ACEs and midlife health. Health behaviors evidenced the strongest indirect effect from ACEs to midlife health. Together, these psychosocial mediators accounted for the association between ACEs in childhood and health three decades later. Public health efforts to mitigate the health consequences of ACEs could aim to reduce the stressful life events people experience, reduce negative emotionality, reduce perceived stress, or improve health behaviors among adults who experienced childhood adversity.
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