COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 14 (UPI) -- A study of 3,568 women found those abused by intimate partners have higher rates of a wide variety of medical maladies, U.S. researchers say.
Many of these health problems are not commonly understood as being associated with violence, such as abdominal pain, chest pain, headaches, acid reflux, urinary tract infections, and menstrual disorders.
"Roughly half of the diagnoses we examined were more common in abused women than in other women," Amy Bonomi of Ohio State University in Columbus, who co-authored the study with researchers from the Group Health Research Institute and the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement.
"Abuse is associated with much more than cuts and bruises."
The researchers then compared the diagnoses of the 242 abused women with the remaining women who had never been abused.
Compared with never-abused women, victims of domestic violence had an almost six-fold increase in clinically identified substance abuse, a more than three-fold increase in receiving a depression diagnosis, a three-fold increase in sexually transmitted diseases and a two-fold increase in lacerations.
Bonomi said the study results may be conservative, because the participants in this study all had health insurance and research shows that women who are not consistently insured have higher rates of intimate partner violence.
The study is published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
