Review of ACE Study Done on Cancer Patients during the Covid-19 Pandemic
I want to take a deeper dive into the topic of the Adverse Childhood Experiences test. I have always been interested in what behaviors and actions make people who they are as adults. The ACE stands for adverse childhood experiences. For this experiment in 2020, researchers looked at how the ACE could affect young adults who had cancer during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. They looked specifically at anxiety, suicidal ideations, CPR levels, and sleep quality. They had two different hypotheses, one being that the ACE affects suicidal ideations and the other that the ACE affects suicidal ideations through symptoms like anxiety and sleep quality (Yang et al., 2020).
The results were that adverse childhood experiences actively affect suicidal ideations. They found that it directly affects anxiety, CPR levels, and sleep quality. They are showing that people who have ACE have high rates of anxiety and CPR levels. On the other hand, it shows that it makes sleep quality worse. The researchers also found that not only does ACE increase someone’s chances of having suicidal ideations, but it also does so through these subcategories. Anxiety, CPR levels, and sleep also affect our mental health and can cause our feelings to fluctuate separately from our ACE results (Yang et al., 2020).
They studied how ACE affects suicidal ideation through questionnaires. They used different questionnaires for each attribute they decided to look at; Adverse Childhood Experiences, the Anxiety Scale, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality, and the Beck Suicide Ideation Scale. Adverse Childhood Experiences were used to quantify someone’s childhood experiences. It is a questionnaire of 10 questions that someone can either score a one or a 0. If you get one, you have experienced that adverse event. For the anxiety scale, someone would do a questionnaire of 20 questions. The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality takes a look at different sleep patterns. And in each of these parts, there are 18 questions. In the Beck Suidical Ideation, someone would take a questionnaire made up of 19 statements and reach a final score of up to 38. They measured the participants’ CPR levels by taking a blood test (Yang et al., 2020).
The results that they found were interesting because though they found that both hypotheses were true, they also found that all these attributes affect each other. Having adverse childhood experiences affected all the other attributes. But they also believe that higher rates of anxiety can affect CPR levels and sleep quality. They also found that anxiety, CPR levels, and sleep quality all have an effect separately on suicidal ideations (Yang et al., 2020).
One of the limitations of the study that stuck out to me was that they didn’t look at how the Covid-19 pandemic could have effected these results especially since these people are of high risk and probably had lower levels of interaction with others outside of this study. They only looked at how Covid-19 affected people wanting to join the study. Something that the study did well was look at the how the different factors play a part in each other not just in suicidal ideations. The study does a great job of showing what this means for different medical fields. When looking at neuroscience it talks about how it is possible that these lasting effects from ACE are due to a change in lesions in the brain. When we experience certain events or develop a skill the make up of our brains change. The same can be said about adverse childhood experiences. They also believe that after looking at how adverse childhood experiences can effect people with cancer, physicians should take into account how childhood experiences can affect their patients now (Yang et al., 2020).
References:
Rousseau, D. (2022). Module 2: Childhood trauma. Blackboard
Yang, G., Xiao, C., Li, S., & Yang, N. (2020). The Effect and Mechanism of Adverse Childhood Experience on Suicide Ideation in Young Cancer Patients During Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic. Risk Management and Healthcare Policy, Volume 13, 1293–1300. https://doi.org/10.2147/rmhp.s266269