Editorial: Sharpening Our Focus on Early Adversity, Development, and Resilience Through Cross-National Research

The impacts of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study continue to reverberate across medicine, influencing clinical practice, research, and public policy, prompting reexamination of the original ACEs research, and generating a range of new research questions that are critical for understanding health and development across the lifespan1,2. Within child and adolescent psychiatry, this explosion of interest in childhood trauma and its consequences is generating rich new areas of inquiry: how does adversity become biologically embedded in brain structure and functioning? What familial, environmental and genetic factors influence resilience and risk? How should we update and adapt the original ACEs framework to account for cultural, ethnic, and geographic differences across populations with various exposures during childhood and distinct ways of experiencing and understanding these exposures? What positive experiences during childhood might have equally profound lifelong health impacts? In this issue of the Journal, Salhi et al.

Source: Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry - August 31, 2020 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Matthew G. Biel, Erica E. Coates Tags: Editorial Source Type: research