Megan Gunnar, director and Regents Professor at the Institute of Child Development, was quoted in a recent Minnesota Public Radio story about effects of early childhood trauma and sexual abuse on later health and wellness in adults. The story, Can family secrets make you sick?, examines some of the epidemiological and preventive medicine research in the 1980’s that eventually led to the method of measurement of the effect of these early experiences, called ACE scores, based on the study of Adverse Childhood Experiences, led by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control. In her research over a 30-year span, Gunnar has been studying the ways that children and their brains develop in response to these stressful experiences. As she states in the report, the part of the brain that governs thought, judgment, and self-control, collectively known as ‘executive function’, seems to be most affected by early stressful experiences. Further, Gunnar says this has been shown to be “terribly important for linking early experiences with later health outcomes.”