Officials from the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department want to know how your childhood was - and they want you to know how that could affect your health now.
For the next two weeks, residents may take the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey on the health department's website.
Bad childhood experiences can lead to poor health and public health consequences for adults, said Dr. Michael Brumage, executive director of the KCHD.
"Until we really begin to address the adverse childhood experiences, we're never going to get to the bottom of the major public health problems that we face here in Kanawha County, Putnam County or the state of West Virginia or anywhere else in the United States for that matter," he said.
The survey asks resident 15 questions about their childhood experiences and their demographic information. At the end, people are told their ACE score, a number from 1 to 10.
The higher a person's score, the higher their risk for smoking, obesity, suicide, depression and drug abuse, Brumage said.
"That doesn't mean that you will have those problems because there are resiliency factors that the ACE score doesn't measure, but it gives you a good indication of maybe not 'what's wrong with me' but 'what's happened to me,'" Brumage said.
The health department's survey is confidential. The survey does not ask a person's name, and health officials won't see results from individual surveys, just as aggregate data, Brumage said.
Dr. Joan Phillips, a child abuse and neglect pediatrician at Charleston Area Medical Center, said often when she sees children as young as kindergartners they already have had four adverse experiences, which can include abuse, living in a drug environment and having a parent incarcerated. Those experiences can cause toxic stress in children, she said.
"We now know that this toxic stress actually changes their body physiologically and actually changes the structure of the brain," Phillips said. "So this is not just about mental health, this is brain health. These are long-lasting effects."
The survey is open to residents anywhere, not just those in Kanawha and Putnam counties.
The survey is based on a similar study conducted as collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Kaiser Permanante's Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego.
Dr. Vincent Felitti, of Kaiser Permanante, one of the investigators of the study, said that what happens in a person's childhood often has a big effect on a person as an adult. He used the analogy of a house fire - if a person sees smoke coming out of a house and brings in fans to disperse the smoke, they're only going to make the fire bigger. In the same way, obesity and other problems are often the symptoms of deeper issues, he said.
"In other words, we must treat the fire as well as the smoke," he said. Felitti spoke at the press conference by speaker phone from San Diego.
An ACE score of more than 6 increases a person's likelihood of intravenous drug use by 4,600 percent, Felitti said.
The survey will be up for two weeks. After that, health officials will analyze the data and then announce it at a later press conference, he said.
Brumage said he hopes people take the survey and read the information on the department's website to find out what the score means for their health. He also hopes to educate medical providers about what the score is and how it can be useful in clinical practice.
To take the survey, go to the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department's website at http://www.kchdwv.org/ and click on the green icon that says "The Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey."
Reach Lori Kersey at
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