Study Correlates Obesity to High Rates of Childhood Traumas
Former Kaiser Researcher Crusades for Early Detection and Treatment
By CONNIE LEWIS
San Diego Business Journal Staff
When Ella Herman complained of abdominal pain her physician told her that she would have to undergo surgery to remove the gallstones that were causing it, but first she needed to shed some weight.
She took his orders to heart. “I ate nothing but lettuce, celery, radishes and cucumbers for a whole month,” recalled Herman of the diet regimen that preceded her surgery almost four decades ago.
Dr. Vincent Felitti, who treated her, said he barely recognized the preoperative patient when she returned to his office and weighed in 40 pounds lighter.
It was not to last. “I was operated on, but quickly gained the weight back afterward. I kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” Herman said.
Felitti, an internist, encountered Herman roughly 15 years later after she’d completed a weight-loss program that stressed dietary supplements. She’d gained, and subsequently lost, roughly 100 pounds.
Felitti, who founded Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Preventive Medicine in 1975, began looking more deeply into reasons underlying obesity and found that many of the weight-loss program’s members had more in common than their need to diet. A high number had experienced sexual abuse as children and were not only obese, but suffered depression.
“Often the weight people put on is their protection,” he said. “Depression is a huge issue with obesity.”
In the mid-1990s, Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, along with researchers at the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recognizing the importance of that program’s clinical observations, launched the Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE study. It involved obtaining detailed medical histories and evaluations of more than 17,000 local Kaiser members, a surprisingly high fraction of who reported childhood abuse and being raised in dysfunctional families. Their average age was 57, and most were middle class in terms of income and education.
According to one report Felitti wrote on the study, there “is a powerful relationship between our emotional experiences as children and our physical and mental health as adults, as well as the major causes of adult mortality in the United States.”
Now What Do We Do?
“It was like opening Pandora’s box,” Felitti, the study’s principal investigator, said. He retired from Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Preventive Medicine in 2001 at age 65, but still works there on a part-time basis.
Not only were adverse childhood experiences more common than earlier recognized or acknowledged, the study revealed that they continued to have a powerful effect on patients’ lives throughout adulthood, he added.
Among the response rate to a list of questions covering different categories of adverse childhood experiences, 11 percent said they were subjected to recurrent and severe physical abuse, while the same percentage said they experienced recurrent and severe emotional abuse. Contact sexual abuse ranked high, at 22 percent.
Childhood Obesity rates correlate to Childhood Traumas
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