Adverse childhood events appear to increase the risk of being a hypertensive adult

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-04/mcog-ace041615.php

Public Release: 16-Apr-2015
Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University

Children who experience multiple traumatic events, from emotional and sexual abuse to neglect, have higher blood pressures as young adults than their peers, researchers report.

The difference of 10 points in the systolic pressure - the top number denoting pressure while the heart is contracting - by early adulthood puts these young people at higher risk for hypertension and coronary artery disease by middle and/or old age, said Dr. Shaoyong Su, genetic epidemiologist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.

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"That is a big difference," said Su, corresponding author of the study in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. "You can predict that five years later, these young people may be hypertensive." He noted that an exponential increase in pressure correlated with an increasing number of bad events.

ACEs include emotional, physical, and sexual abuse; emotional and physical neglect; and household dysfunction, such as substance abuse or domestic violence. MCG researchers found the blood pressure increase resulting from experiencing multiple ACEs wasn't fully explained by known concurrent risk factors such as being male, black, a low socioeconomic status, inactivity, obesity, and smoking.

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About 70 percent of the children from the Richmond County public school system reported at least one ACE; 18 percent reported more than three. About 30 percent of that 18 percent came from well-educated families with good incomes. In fact, in conflict with associations between ACEs and a lower socioeconomic status, the researchers found that 50 percent of their participants with a history of childhood abuse and 40 percent who reported neglect came from medium or high income families. While the blood pressure of black males tended to run higher generally and blacks had slightly more exposure to ACEs, there was not a significant difference in the impact of ACEs on blood pressure between blacks and whites, the researchers found.

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The Adverse Childhood Experience Study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in collaboration with Kaiser Permanente's Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego looked at more than 17,000 adults who also provided information about ACEs. While there have been more than 50 papers published on the findings, overall findings suggest that the experiences are risk factors for many of the leading causes of illness and death as well as poor life quality. About 12.5 percent of participants had experienced four or more ACEs.

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Su notes that percentages of children experiencing ACEs are similar whether looking across Georgia, the nation, or the world. His study participants were not asked how often or how long their bad experiences occurred, just whether they had one or more from the different categories.