Women’s Experiences of Sexual Assault and Harassment Linked With High Blood Pressure
Sexual violence may have compound effects on women’s cardiovascular health
Women who had ever experienced sexual violence in their lifetime — including sexual assault and workplace sexual harassment — were more likely to develop high blood pressure over a seven-year follow-up period, according to findings from a large, longitudinal study of women in the United States. The research, funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, indicated that sexual violence was a common experience, affecting more than 20% of the women in the sample.
“Our results showed that women who reported experiencing both sexual assault and workplace sexual harassment had the highest risk of hypertension, suggesting potential compounding effects of multiple sexual violence exposures on women’s cardiovascular health,” said Rebecca B. Lawn, Ph.D.(link is external), of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, lead author on the study.
Lawn and colleagues analyzed associations between lifetime exposure to sexual violence and blood pressure while accounting for the possible impacts of exposure to other types of trauma. For data, the researchers used the Nurses’ Health Study II (NHS II), a longitudinal study of adult women in the U.S. that began in 1989 with 115,000 nurses enrolled.
Over time, the NHS II has collected data on a wide range of sociodemographic, medical, and behavioral variables. As part of a 2008 NHS II sub-study, a subgroup of participants reported whether they had ever experienced sexual harassment at work (either physical or verbal) and whether they had ever experienced unwanted sexual contact. They also reported exposure to other traumas, such as an accident, disaster, or unexpected death of a loved one.
Lawn and colleagues analyzed the NHS II sub-study data, excluding those participants who already had a diagnosis of high blood pressure or were taking medication for high blood pressure from their analyses. They also excluded women who had a history of cardiovascular or cerebrovascular disease. The final sample consisted of 33,127 women who were ages 43 to 64 in 2008.
The NHS II data indicated that experiences of sexual violence were common: about 23% of the women had experienced sexual assault at some point in their life and 12% had experienced workplace sexual harassment. About 6% of women had experienced both.
About 21% of the women reported developing high blood pressure over the follow-up period, from 2008 to 2015.
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