ABSTRACT
Obesity, aside from its psychosocial and economic effects, is contributing or root causes of type 2 diabetes; heart disease; high blood pressure; nonalcoholic fatty liver disease; degenerative arthritis; breast, colon, kidney, and endometrial cancers. Adverse childhood events ought to occur in groups, and they do: e.g., a family unit can’t be otherwise perfect if one of the children is being sexually abused or the mother is repeatedly beaten. The computerized health databases available for this population allowed correlation of Adverse Childhood Event (ACE) scores with adult health. Traumatic experiences have specific meaning to the survivor and always contain the terrifying sense of powerlessness in the face of overwhelming stresses. ACE score did not predict happiness with the surgical outcome, presumably because of the confounding factor of resilience. The ramifications of the ACE data have percolated into the medical literature, though often with insufficient recognition of how much they mean.
