The impact of adverse childhood experiences in the development of post-traumatic stress disorder in adults over 18 years of age: a systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects mental health in the long term and is often associated with past psychological trauma. This systematic review was conducted with a purpose to investigate the correlation between adverse childhood experiences (ACE), experiences of child maltreatment, and the occurrence of PTSD in adults over 18 years to optimize treatment guidelines accordingly. METHOD: The review utilized articles searched on PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, and Cochrane. Inclusion criteria include original studies (RCTs, cross-sectional, and cohorts) involving adults over 18 years with PTSD with a history of ACE published during the last decade (2014 and 2025). This study was conducted according to preferred reported items in systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. A quality assessment of the included studies was conducted using Newcastle Ottawa scale for cohort studies and the axis scale for cross-sectional studies. RESULTS: Out of 356 articles, 169 were screened, of which 26 studies were included in this review. These studies discussed various forms of childhood maltreatment, including sexual abuse, physical abuse, traumatic events, and neglect from parents. Most of these studies indicate a direct correlation between childhood maltreatment and Adulthood PTSD. CONCLUSION: A robust association exists between ACE and childhood maltreatment and the development of PTSD in adulthood. There is a need for more literature to study the effects of maltreatment and comorbid mental health conditions for policymaking to protect child mental health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".