This edition of Airing Pain is on the topic of early childhood experiences.
(Content warning: includes abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction)
The World Health Organisation states that ‘adverse childhood experiences (ACE) can have lifelong consequences on a person’s health, and well-being, and can lead to a person developing persistent pain in later life’. A lot of this research is conducted in adults, and of course with changes in attitudes and beliefs surrounding raising children over the years, would they consider events in their childhood to be adverse?
Listen to learn more about this complex discussion. Find out how this kind of trauma in formative years impacts neurobiologically on the stress response, and causes changes on a structural and functional level in the brain that can predispose young people not only to pain but depression, cardiovascular disease, behaviours with increased health risks, and can have impact on mortality.
Contributors:
Dr Katie Birnie, Clinical Psychologist at the University of Calgary, on the importance of validating pain in young people.
Professor Lesley Colvin, Project Lead at Consortium Against Pain InEquality (CAPE) and Professor of Pain Medicine at the University of Dundee, and consultant in pain services.
Jen Ford, DRAP Pain Physio & Therapy Lead at Bath Centre for Pain Services & Bristol Paediatric Pain
Professor Lesley Colvin, Project Lead at Consortium Against Pain InEquality (CAPE) - and Professor of Pain Medicine at the University of Dundee, and consultant in pain services.
Professor Tim Hales, Project Lead at CAPE and a non-clinical Professor of anaethesia at the University of Dundee.
Dr Lauren Heathcote, Senior Lecturer in health psychology at Kings College London
