Researchers Explore Ways to Reduce Stress in Children

It’s not news that poverty is bad for your health. People with the lowest incomes typically have the highest rates of diabetes, heart disease, malnutrition and a wide range of medical conditions.

But, increasingly, scientists are finding that these health traumas not only cause physical illness but also can impact neural connections, the immune system, and even the expression of genes.

“Stress has not always been accepted as a valid construct in clinical medicine or in public health or even in the basic sciences,” Dr. Mary Bassett said. “It’s only a recent development that we’ve moved past thinking of it as a feeling and begun to think of it as a deep experience that affects our whole body.”

Bassett, the health commissioner for New York City, was speaking at a conference Tuesday on Poverty, The Brain and Mental Health. She described the growing literature on Adverse Childhood Experiences. These ACEs – incidents of abuse, neglect, domestic violence – are thought to have a cumulative effect on the body. Researchers in San Diego first described the phenomenon a decade ago.

“They found a powerful connection between the number of ACEs and the incidence of health and social problems well into adulthood, and they found that ACEs were far more common than anticipated,” Basset said.

Nonetheless, she told an audience of mental health professionals, children exposed to adverse events might have increased odds of ill health and continued poverty, but that doesn’t mean the effects of the exposure can’t be reversed.

“We know that stresses make their way into our bodies and affect our lives,” she said, “but researchers have also demonstrated the power of resilience, the ability to adapt, to mitigate, to bounce back in the face of adversity.”

She said public health leaders had been slow to convert new research on “toxic stress” into action plans for the government.

“For too long we focused only on child survival,” Bassett said, “but we now know we need children not only to survive but to thrive.”