Reports of physical and sexual abuse, witnessed violence, and non-assaultive trauma before age 18 among youth in this high-risk family study were common, tracking rates of other studies on trauma exposure in adolescents (e.g. Carliner et al., 2016; Kilpatrick et al., 2003; Meyers et al., 2018; Smyth et al., 2010) albeit with some important differences. As expected, parental AUD status was associated with the experience of one or more of these traumas, and this relationship differed somewhat by the sex of the parent affected. A key finding is the higher-than-average prevalence (8.6%) of PTSD among trauma-exposed youth, notable for two reasons. The first is that the diagnosis was indexed to childhood trauma only rather than a retrospective lifetime report and the second is the high prevalence of severe childhood trauma exposure (nearly 80% of youth affected by assaultive trauma).
