The keys to helping people out of poverty, substance abuse and chronic health issues may involve addressing how those issues affect people when they are children, two Kingston-area researchers said.

As part of the Community Foundation for Kingston and Area’s speaker series, Meredith MacKenzie, a physician with the Street Health Clinic, and Kris Millan, the director of family health with Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox and Addington Public Health, talked about more than 20 years of research that have showed the links between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and social and health issues people experience later in life.

“It’s the effects later on in life, but also the effects right now in the child and also generationally,” MacKenzie said. “These things are transmitted intergenerationally, so your ACEs affect your kids and that’s why we are so focused on the prevention piece. It’s so critically important to talk about.”

There are 10 categories of ACEs, including physical and emotional abuse and neglect, sexual abuse, substance abuse and physical abuse within the family setting.

Exposure to any of those kinds of incidents can not only affect adults directly but can have lasting impacts that affect children later in their life.

“It’s that intergenerational transmission and the other social determinants of health, like poverty, food insecurity, lack of safe affordable housing,” MacKenzie said. “These are the things that are contributing to poor outcomes in our community.”

Much of the research on ACEs has been done in the United States, but the results translate, with some modifications, to Canada.

There has been some research in Alberta and by researchers at the University of Guelph in Wellington and Dufferin counties.

“ACEs are not new, but it is certainly a topic of interest that is gaining more ground, I think particularly in Canada,” Millan said. “We are starting to think about it more in Canada. I think the Canadian-American context are a little bit different.

“The bottom line is we need to be caring for children in the context of their families and their communities.”

In her work with Street Health, MacKenzie said she has anecdotal evidence that the incidence of ACEs is increasing in the Kingston area but no formal research has been done locally.

“It requires a lot of vision and courage to take the step and look with a prevention lens,” she said. “We don’t have a prevention lens in North America, and public health, I think they are just perfectly situated to do this work, because that is exactly what public health is about. They are about health promotion and prevention of disease before it occurs.

“It’s a different way of looking at health. Right now we look at health as an acute care system. We have problems that develop and we respond to those things,” she said. “What we are seeing now is it is being overwhelmed by chronic conditions, so we are looking much farther upstream and how can we prevent these chronic conditions from occurring in the first place.”