Independent Peer Review of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Checklist (ACEs)

Why "Risk for cancer increases with the number of items checked" can't be right.

I needed an independent peer review of a published article extolling the ACEs as a means of predicting the modifiable risk of getting cancer in later life.

I found the email of a noted cancer epidemiologist on the Internet. Of course, I did not tell him about this egregious claim. If he was truly a noted cancer epidemiologist, he should be able to figure out many other things that were wrong with using the ACEs to predict mental and physical health.

I asked him to provide an independent peer review of an already published paper, Miller et al. “Adult health burden and costs in California during 2013 associated with prior adverse childhood experiences.”

I contacted him again a few weeks ago. We were amused to discover that neither of us could recall when and why I had originally requested the review.

He was the first to say:

“This is not something I've worked on.  Are you confusing me with someone else?”

And then

“Now I remember -- I had no memory of my response to you from 2013. “

The menti…