Word: felitti
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...recent years, studies by both Felitti and others have largely confirmed the association between sexual abuse - as well as other types of traumatic childhood experience - and eating disorders or obesity. A 2007 study of more than 11,000 California women found that those who had been abused as children were 27% more likely to be obese as adults, compared with those who had not, after adjusting for other factors. A 2009 study of more than 15,000 adolescents found that sexual abuse in childhood raised the risk of obesity 66% in males in adulthood. That study found no such effect...
Discoveries by Felitti and colleagues have also helped give rise to broader work linking stressful experiences early in life - as early as in the womb - to effects on health and behavior later on, such as an increased risk of heart disease or becoming addicted to drugs. Scientists are finding that such effects are not only long-lasting, but can even be inherited by future generations. (Watch a video about obesity and social networks...
...When Felitti first presented his Kaiser Permanente data connecting obesity with child molestation at a national meeting on obesity in 1990, most colleagues dismissed him immediately (one even claimed that obese people made up such stories to justify their "failed lives"). David Williamson, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was the lone exception. He said that a large epidemiological study was needed to determine whether there were any implications of Felitti's findings for public health...
...Felitti knew that he had just the right data set: Kaiser Permanente has the largest medical-evaluation facility in the developed world, diagnosing some 58,000 patients annually. Even if only a minority agreed to discuss their childhoods and allow anonymous use of their medical records, that would be a huge sample. And so the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study was born, as a collaboration of Felitti and another CDC researcher, Dr. Robert Anda...
...ACEs are also strongly linked with other types of unhealthy "self-medication": for instance, cigarette smoking (which accounts for the increased rate of emphysema among high ACE scorers) and drug abuse (having four or more ACEs increases the risk of injectable-drug use by a factor of 10). As Felitti puts it, "Being fat [or having other unhealthy behaviors] is not the problem. It's the solution...