Stop Using the Adverse Childhood Experiences Checklist For Claims About Trauma Causing Physical and Mental Health Problems

A golden oldie about a seriously flawed and widely misused checklist returns.

Original text published in ‘Mind the Brain’ blog on November 15, 2017:

Scores on the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) checklist (or ACC) are widely used to make claims about the causal influence of childhood trauma on mental and physical health problems. Does anyone making these claims bother to look at how the checklist is put together and consider what a summary score might mean?

In this issue of Mind the Brain, we begin taking a skeptical look at the ACE checklist. We ponder some of the assumptions implicit in what items were included and how summary scores of the number of items checked are interpreted. Readers will be left with profound doubts that the ACE is suitable for making claims about trauma.

This blog will eventually be followed by another that presents the case that scores on the ACC do not represent a risk factor for health problems, only a relatively uninformative risk marker. In contrast to potentially modifiable risk factors, risk markers are best interpreted as call…