they were surprised, first, by the sheer prevalence of childhood trauma among this generally well-off population. More than a quarter of the patients said they had grown up in a household with an alcoholic or a drug user; about the same fraction had been beaten as children. When the doctors used the data to assign each patient an ACE score, giving them one point for each category of trauma they had experienced, they found that two-thirds of the patients had experienced at least one ACE, and one in eight had an ACE score of 4 or more.
