Quantifying the impact of early life growth adversity on later life health | Communications Medicine - Nature

Childhood trauma can leave scars that last long after the experiences themselves have ended. Its effects can reach into adult life, increasing the risk of mental illness, physical health problems and other difficulties. Our latest research estimates that the health effects associated with adverse childhood experiences cost the equivalent of £7.8 billion in Wales and £115.6 billion in England in 2023. These figures represent 8.4% of Wales’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 5% of England’s.

MainReliable and trustworthy science communication requires measured claims that accurately reflect empirical evidence1,2. In academic publications, this ideal translates into reporting research questions, methods, results and implications in a way that avoids distortion and misleading readers3,4. Yet scientific articles are not purely objective accounts of facts. Researchers retain considerable discretion in how they operationalize constructs and rhetorically frame their findings5,6,7, providing flexibility that also opens the door to misinterpretation. An important case of what we call ‘Narrative License’ occurs when scholars claim or imply that correlational findings are causal without conducting the appropriate tests8. In such cases, readers seeking evidence-based solutions9 may find themselves persuaded of causal claims that are not based on causal evidence. Conflating correlation with causation can yield serious real-world consequences when such claims inform policy, medicine, or communication. For example, in political science, influential work argued that civil wars were driven not by poverty or ethnic grievances but by structural opportunities for insurgency10,11.