| Poster | Poster Session 05 Program Schedule
02/15/2024
02:30 pm - 03:45 pm
Room: Shubert Complex (Posters 1-60)
Poster Session 05: Neuropsychiatry | Addiction/Dependence | Stress/Coping | Emotional/Social Processes
Final Abstract #50
Adverse Childhood Experiences and Cognitive Difficulty in High School Students in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Ila Iverson, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
Grant Iverson, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States
Category: Assessment/Psychometrics/Methods (Child)
Keyword 1: adolescence
Keyword 2: cognitive functioning
Keyword 3: depression
Objective:
The Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey (ABES) was conducted by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2021 to examine disruption and adversity experienced by high school students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Questions relating to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as experiencing physical abuse, emotional abuse, or sexual abuse, were included in the survey. We examined the association between ACEs and self-reported cognitive difficulty in high school students in the United States. We hypothesized that ACEs would be independently associated with perceived cognitive difficulty, after adjusting for depression during the past year, suicidality during the past year, and current mental health problems.
Participants and Methods:
The ABES was a one-time, online survey. Students’ cognitive difficulty was assessed with the question: ‘Because of a physical, mental, or emotional problem, do you have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?’ Student responses were analyzed in relation to four ACEs variables relating to sexual violence (lifetime and past 12 months), parental emotional abuse, and parental physical abuse. Mental health was assessed with questions relating to feeling sad or hopeless in the past year, considering suicide in the past year, and having poor mental health in the past month.
Results:
Participants were 6,945 students, age 14 to 18, with 3,267 boys (45%) and 3,678 girls (55%). A large proportion of students reported experiencing cognitive difficulties (45.2%), with girls (56.3%) significantly more likely to endorse cognitive problems compared to boys [32.6%; χ2(1)=392.713, p<.001]. Students who reported poor mental health in the past 30 days were very likely to also endorse cognitive difficulties (girls: 81% and boys: 67%). Students who denied poor mental health, depression, and suicidal ideation reported cognitive difficulty in relatively low proportions (girls 17% and boys 12%). Binary logistic regressions were used to examine the association between ACEs and cognitive problems, adjusting for current mental health. These analyses were conducted separately for girls [χ2(5)=928.53, p<.001; Nagelkerke R2=.31] and boys [χ2(9)=550.51, p<.001; Nagelkerke R2=.22]. For both boys and girls, after adjusting for current poor mental health, sadness and hopelessness over the past year, and suicidal ideation over the past year, independent predictors of cognitive difficulties included parental verbal abuse and parental physical abuse. For girls, lifetime forced sexual intercourse and sexual violence during the past year were also independently associated with cognitive difficulty after adjusting for the mental health variables.
Conclusions:
It is well established that ACEs are associated with a broad range of physical and mental health conditions and problems. There is an association between ACEs and perceived cognitive difficulty in both girls and boys, even after adjusting for poor mental health, among high school students during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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