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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten.

Today on the podcast, how childhood trauma shows up in adulthood.

This message that we hear, if you have a trauma, you're going to have all these poor health

outcomes. And while that message can be true, it's not a guarantee.

Just a heads up that our next conversation covers a sensitive subject, trauma.

We know that the experiences from our childhood, the good and the bad, shape who we become as adults.

But understanding what kinds of early experiences have staying power into adulthood,

and the wide range of impacts they can have is an

emerging science. Here to tell us more is Preeti Simran Saiti, a science writer and Rosalind

Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow, who's been reporting on Asian mental health.

Preeti, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Flora. So today we're talking about studying the effects of

negative childhood experiences, you know, basically trying to understand the impact of childhood trauma.

When did people start digging into this question scientifically, like trying to understand it on a population level?

Well, I mean, back in the 19th century, scholars like Freud theorized about the impacts

of childhood trauma on adults, but it wasn't studied in large groups of people until the

1980s. And the first researchers to do so didn't set out to study childhood trauma at all.

They were actually studying obesity. Back in 1980, a doctor in San Diego named Vincent Felitti, who was chief of the

Department of Preventative Medicine at one of America's biggest health care companies,

started a clinic to help people lose weight. And it really took off. But then this strange thing kept

happening. Patients would successfully lose weight and then... They were finding this really

unusual trend where women who were losing a consistent amount of weight and actually were doing

...