“ACEs are associated with our health over a lifetime, so the more ACEs that a person has experienced, the greater their risk of experiencing issues with their mental health (depression, anxiety, suicidality) and their physical health, diabetes, asthma, heart disease, and cancer,” says Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, pediatrician, senior advisor to the ACE Resource Network, and California’s first-ever Surgeon General, who not only launched the first statewide effort to train over 20,000 primary caregivers on how to screen for ACEs and respond with informed care, but has set a lofty goal to cut ACEs and toxic stress in California by half in one generation. “When I learned about it as a doctor, it was really important for me to shout it from the rooftops — because so many people don’t know that what happens to us in our childhood can actually impact the way that we feel years later.”
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