“Look at the photo on the left, a little girl of age 8,” he said of the black-and-white picture, among three on the big screens in the packed auditorium of Butler-Haney Hall. The others showed the woman before and after her successful weight loss. Knowing how slender she was at 8 prompted Felitti to ask when her struggles with weight began.

She began gaining weight when she was 11 — the same age her grandfather began molesting her, Felitti recalled. The woman said she felt like she was losing her “protective wall” when her weight dropped. He soon learned that another woman in the program who gained back the weight she lost had been sexually abused by a relative.

“We started asking everyone in the obesity program,” he said.

That was the beginning of Felitti’s landmark work as co-principal investigator of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, which is ongoing collaborative research between the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program and the Centers for Disease Control. The study was devised to determine the prevalence and significance of such events in a general population, he said.

“And that prevalence is startling,” Felitti added.