by Brenda Lange

It seems obvious now — with the benefit of decades of research, advocacy and public exposure — but when Sandra Bloom, M.D., began her life’s work, the connection had not yet been made between traumatic events experienced by children and the physical and mental ailments that plagued them in later life.

Dr. Bloom, who lives in Chestnut Hill, is an associate professor of health management and policy in the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University, a psychiatrist and public health teacher, activist and scholar who began to study the lifelong effects of childhood trauma almost by accident.

Dr. Bloom, who has authored or co-authored several books, including “Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies” (1997), “Bearing Witness: Trauma and Collective Responsibility” (1998) and “Destroying Sanctuary: The Crisis in Human Service Delivery” (2013), will make a presentation, “How early life affects long-term health,” at the Chestnut Hill Meeting House, 20 E. Mermaid Lane, on Wednesday, Oct. 24, starting at 7 p.m.

After earning her medical degree at Temple University, Dr. Bloom, 70, founded and ran an inpatient mental health facility, first in Quakertown at the hospital, then in other locations for 20 years until it was forced to close due to lack of funding. While caring for these individuals, she gradually began to recognize common signs of various types of trauma that manifested in her patients.

“It became clear that much of what we had been treating was widespread and was preventable — for thousands of people I had been involved with,” she says. “I came to recognize that most of those patients had had bad things happen to them when they were kids, but we didn’t know how to study that. There was no real lifespan approach at that time. It was a mind-boggling realization.”

From the mid-1980s to just after the turn of the century, Dr. Bloom focused her treatment on adults who had been abused. Her studies of these individuals helped her focus her research and contribute to this developing field — post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“Named in 1980 for the returning Vietnam vets, PTSD always had been associated with combat, but there weren’t many connections made between what was happening to soldiers and what was happening to others who had been victims in their own homes,” she says.

Since the ’80s, a vast knowledge base of the effects of all kinds of trauma and how it affects victims at different ages has been built. “It’s difficult to see patterns because there is a diversity of its appearance over time, and it looks different in every person. The long-term effects of childhood trauma that is not fully healed continue to have profound physiological and psychological effects. We just didn’t have the evidence to connect all its different manifestations.”

Dr. Bloom stresses that these manifestations are not only psychological. They also are physical. “Early childhood problems take a toll on how our developing body and brain work together, and today we are learning about those connections.”

The first Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE, study was done in San Diego with 18,000 middle-class, mostly white Americans. A point is given for each of 10 types of adversities, such as exposure to physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect. Living in a household where a member was incarcerated, a substance abuser or mentally ill, or the loss of a parent to death or divorce all garner a point.

“What shocked the researchers was that the majority of this population had exposure to at least one ACE, and a substantial proportion had exposure to more than one. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) found that the higher the ACE score, the more likely people were to suffer from conditions that led to death — heart disease, cancer, stroke, autoimmune diseases and alcohol or drug abuse. This was brand new information. It was staggering.”

The study has since been repeated around the world, and the correlation stands. Dr. Bloom shares statistics, such as the fact that 38 percent of residents of every state in this country have one or more ACEs. In a recent study of more than 200,000 individuals in 23 states, 62 percent of women had at least one ACE, and 25 percent had three or more.

“The higher the (number of) ACEs, the higher the dysfunction and the more you see multiple problems — physical and substance abuse, for example,” Dr. Bloom adds.

In 2012, Dr. Bloom joined Philadelphia’s ACE Task Force to use such data to drive societal change. It’s a daunting task, as the city has the highest rate of deep poverty in the country for one of its size. “We need to work together, and it begins with education. That’s how you start.”

For more information about the Oct. 24 event, call 215-438-8102.