UW-Madison Researchers Make Surprising Discoveries Regarding Childhood Trauma and Mental Health

Thursday, January 9th, 2025 -- 12:00 PM

(Beatrice Lawrence, Wisconsin Public Radio) University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers recently made what they call surprising discoveries about how childhood trauma affects mental health in adolescence, thanks to a national trove of childhood health data. 

According to Beatrice Lawrence with the Wisconsin Public Radio, researchers with the National Institutes of Health are in the middle of conducting the largest long-term study of childhood health in the U.S.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study follows more than 11,000 children across the U.S. over 10 years of their life, starting at ages 9 to 10.

Using data from the first four years of that study, psychiatric researchers at UW-Madison recently found evidence to suggest that the type of trauma a child experiences could be more impactful than the sheer amount of trauma they encounter.

Since at least the 1990s, mental health researchers have known that having traumatic experiences during childhood can affect a person’s mental and physical health as they grow up.

Many pediatricians use questionnaires on adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, in order to identify patients that might be at greater risk of future health problems.

However, the ACEs questionnaire has limits. By simply tallying up the number of adverse experiences a child has had, it treats all experiences as equally influential.

And it can only tell physicians about a child’s general health risk, it cannot predict specific health problems. Justin Russell, research assistant professor of psychiatry, and his colleagues at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health wanted to see if they could push past those limits.

“We wanted to build off of what we understand from the ACEs work and see: Are different forms of trauma going to be predictive of different outcomes?” Russell told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”

From the data collected by the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, Russell’s team created eight themes to categorize the traumatic and adverse situations that study participants had experienced: community threat, peer aggression, caregiver maladjustment, chronic pain and medical issues, discrimination, family conflict, poverty, and interpersonal violence.

That’s where researchers discovered that the type of trauma could have more of an impact on mental health than the number of traumatic events a child experiences.

More surprising was learning that some types of traumatic experiences were actually associated with a decrease in certain mental health problems later on.

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.