Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — A new study shows that women who experience sexual violence or sexual harassment in the workplace, or both, face higher long-term risks. For high blood pressure, compared with women who would not experience similar shocks.
High blood pressure is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, which is the deadliest among women. According to the American Heart Association, heart disease causes the death of one in 3 women annually.
Study author Rebecca Lawn, a postdoctoral research fellow in epidemiology at Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston, said in a statement that statistics indicate that 44% of women reported being sexually assaulted, and nearly 80% of women They report sexual harassment in the workplace, yet this exposure is “not widely recognized as a contributor to the impact on cardiovascular health in women”.
“We found that exposure to sexual assault and sexual harassment in the workplace had a significant risk of high blood pressure, and this is underlined by the potentially exacerbating effects of multiple sexual violence on women’s long-term cardiovascular health,” Lawn added.
Abuse in public and private life
The study, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, on Tuesday, analyzed data from a 2008 report from the Nurses’ Continuing Health Study Two, one of the National Institutes of Health’s largest investigation of risk factors for major chronic diseases in women.
More than 33,000 women, who had never experienced high blood pressure, reported in 2008 that they had experienced sexual violence and other trauma.
The women, mostly middle-aged white nurses, also answered questions about PTSD and depression.
The situation of women was reassessed in 2015, that is, after 7 years. During this time, medical records revealed that 1 in 5 women developed high blood pressure, with higher risks for women who experienced sexual trauma in their work and private lives.
The study also found that women who reported sexual assault and harassment in the workplace had a 21% increased risk of developing high blood pressure.
The risk of developing hypertension for women who said they had been sexually harassed in the workplace increased by 15%, while those who reported having been sexually assaulted had an 11% higher risk of developing high blood pressure, compared to women who had not experienced sexual trauma.
“We did not find any association between the risk of developing high blood pressure and women who had experienced other types of trauma other than sexual violence, which indicates that the increased risk of high blood pressure is not caused by exposure to all types of trauma,” Lawn noted.
“The body tells the story”
Previous research has also indicated a significant relationship between sexual trauma and health risks in women.
A 2008 study measured the blood pressure of more than 1,000 low-income, ethnically diverse workers, and concluded that sexual harassment is associated with increased blood pressure in women.
“In a sense, the body tells the story,” Nancy Krieger, a 2008 study author, told CNN in a previous interview.
“Not everyone has the ability and willingness to determine what happened to them, but that doesn’t prevent the body from forming and expressing opinions about what happened,” said Krieger, professor of social epidemiology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health.
And a study using clinical measurements, conducted in 2019, showed that women who reported sexual harassment in the workplace had higher blood pressure than those who did not.
It also found that the blood pressure was high enough to put the women at risk of stroke, aneurysms, kidney disease, heart attacks, and other types of heart disease.
Sexual harassment has also been linked to higher levels of triglycerides, a major risk factor for heart disease.
“There was a significant difference in health outcomes between women who experienced sexual assault or sexual harassment, demonstrating the universality of these types of experiences,” 2019 study author Rebecca Thurston, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said in a previous interview.
The Thurston study also used clinical measurements to study sleep and emotional health, and found that women who reported previous sexual assault were three times more likely to experience depression, and two times more likely to experience anxiety than women who had not experienced sexual trauma. And women who were sexually assaulted or molested were twice as likely to have trouble sleeping, including insomnia.
Doctors should inquire about sexual trauma
With heart disease being the number one cause of death for women, it’s time for doctors to ask their patients about their history of sexual trauma, according to Lawn.
“The findings suggest that investigating and remedial investigations of a broader range of sexual violence experiences in routine health care, including sexual harassment in the workplace, verbal harassment or assault, and addressing potential cardiovascular health consequences may be beneficial to women’s long-term health,” she added. the long”.
She emphasized that “reducing sexual violence against women is important in its own right, and may also provide a strategy to improve women’s cardiovascular health for life.”