First, they discovered that ACEs were astonishingly common—67 percent of the population had at least one category of ACE and 12.6 percent had four or more categories of ACEs. Second, they found a dose-response relationship between ACEs and poor health outcomes, meaning that the higher a person’s ACE score, the greater the risk to his or her health. For instance, a person with four or more ACEs was twice as likely to develop heart disease and cancer and three and a half times as likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) as a person with zero ACEs.
