ACE and acute respiratory distress syndrome: Interestingly, some studies have reported that the ACE gene insertion/deletion (I/D) polymorphism of a fragment of 287 pairs of bases in intron 16 is associated with the incidence and consequence of ARDS in patients [27, 28], as well as related to the hypoxemia of SARS cases revealed by Itoyama et al. in Vietnamese individuals [29].