By National Governors Association
Many Americans have experienced traumatic events, toxic stress, and other types of adversity in childhood. However, repeated exposure to trauma and adversity in childhood predicts a variety of poor health outcomes, including the development of substance use disorder (SUD).
Population-level research, neuroscience, epigenetics, and other fields have established that the connection between childhood adversity and SUD, as well as risk for intergenerational transmission of both trauma and SUD, occurs through impacts of adverse experiences on brain development. There are various risk and protective factors at play that can exacerbate or mitigate this relationship.
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