Are a you a childhood physical, emotional or sexual abuse survivor who also suffers from an inflammatory or auto-immune condition? Research shows the abuse and your illness may be linked.

PLEASE NOTE: I am not a doctor or medical student. I’m just someone who believes that American doctors have a long way to go in learning how to heal the whole person, and not just throw pills at random symptoms which may all have one root cause.

I found the links to this research in what seems like a never ending quest to find good alternative treatments for my own auto-immune condition (Graves Disease), because I believe that knowing as much as I can about the root of this condition in my mind/body complex will help me eradicate it.

One such root for auto-immune diseases like Graves and others, a recently published study suggests, is childhood stress.

Research shows child abuse may have long lasting consequences for survivors.

The study, done by the CDC using data culled from a pool of over 15,000 people between 1995-1997 with some follow-up through 2005, concluded that “Childhood traumatic stress increased the likelihood of hospitalization with a diagnosed autoimmune disease decades into adulthood.”

The study’s conclusion also found that “These findings are consistent with recent biological studies on the impact of early life stress on subsequent inflammatory responses.”

As part of the study, participant’s ACE scores were taken into account. ACE is an acronym for Adverse Childhood Experiences.

The ACE rating system was developed by Dr. Vincent Felitti, Founder of the Department of Preventive Medicine in Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, and his colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The system uses a questionnaire of various adverse childhood experiences to calculate a person’s total ACE score, which is then used to determine how the extent of that person’s childhood traumas may have affected their later life.

Basically, the higher your ACE score, the higher your chances are (according to the rating system) of experiencing multiple forms of health, behavioral and/or social problems as an adult.

I’m mentioning ACEs here because some of the more scientificky stuff below mentions them, and you have to know what the heck ACEs are in this context to understand the part of the study I’m about to quote.

Though the entire study is fascinating, I’m quoting this part of the study because as a woman I found it particularly interesting.

As many women know who suffer from auto-immune and inflammatory diseases, these ailments seem to target us more than men, which makes it extremely frustrating to explain to men clueless about the effects of these diseases that no, some women who seem to have lost their zest for life are not just being fat, bitchy and lazy on purpose–we’re sick dammit!–so maybe more men should also pay attention to how these disease affect women? Yep.

It’s part of the study that suggests a possible explanation for why women seem more prone to inflammatory and autoimmune diseases (AD below stands for Autoimmune Disease).

Rheumatic diseases are a group of inflammatory disorders in which autoantibodies and immune complex deposition produce tissue damage (44). One of the characteristics of rheumatic diseases is the production of rheumatoid factor (RF), which is an autoantibody that binds other antibodies.

RF is usually produced following viral infections (44), suggesting that infections may contribute to the development of AD (49). Fairweather and Frisancho-Kiss have found that social stress occurring before viral infection in rodents increased inflammatory heart disease in both sexes, but especially in females (unpublished results). These findings and the present study suggest that childhood stressful events may increase ADs independently as well as amplify the effect of other environmental factors, such as infections.

Thus, a possible explanation for the increased prevalence of ADs in females is that females respond to similar stressful events differently than males due to sex differences in their physiology and neurobiology (i.e., greater Th2 and glucocorticoid levels that are further amplified by stress) (13,50).

In addition, physiological and anatomical changes in the brains of individuals who have experienced childhood abuse have been documented. For example, Teicher et al. conducted electroencephalograms to measure limbic irritability and found the percentage of clinically significant brain-wave abnormalities to be higher among individuals who had a history of early trauma versus those who did not experience early trauma (51).

Magnetic resonance imaging has revealed reductions in hippocampal volumes among severely sexually abused women, and reductions in the intracranial and cerebral volumes among maltreated children compared with nonabused individuals (51–53).

Although the effects cannot be defined to any specific area of the brain, it has been shown that the limbic system, which is responsible for emotional response, is adversely affected. Because ACEs rarely occur in isolation (14,15), the cumulative effect of multiple ACEs shown in our study may have an even more powerful negative effect on a young child’s developing brain via repeated activation of the stress response.

This repeated “dosing” of the developing central nervous system by adrenal catecholamines and corticosteroids may contribute to central nervous system- and endocrine-mediated differences in immune function that result in an increased risk for AD.

All that to say, in a super scientificky way, “Hey! Child abuse can really f*ck you up as an adult!”

Especially it seems, in terms of the possibility of contracting inflammatory and auto-immune diseases, if you are an adult female abuse survivor.

Reading all this pisses me off.

Because if the findings of this study are accurate, abuse may encompass a far wider range of effects on a person beyond the immediate physical and mental distress most people think it causes.

And it makes me think of how many people might be suffering today because of crimes committed against them decades ago?

And of all the sick days lost yearly by people with autoimmune and inflammatory disease, on top of the medical costs survivors have to pay to treat illnesses possibly sped on by crimes perpetrated against them?

And of how many children are growing up today in a state where they might be more likely to develop one or more illnesses because of something someone else did to them?

Abuse costs us all and the mounting price on society is one we can’t afford to pay. Let’s do everything we can as individuals to end child abuse!

What do you think of this study?

Do you think there’s really a link between childhood abuse and adult disease? Or is this just junk science?

Weigh in with your thoughts below!