Prevalence of brain injury could be higher among domestic violence survivors than in those who play contact sports, new research has revealed.
A study has revealed as many as 60 per cent of women who are subject to interpersonal violence had symptoms consistent with having a brain injury.
In comparison, the lifetime prevalence of traumatic brain injury in US collegiate football is between 21 and 25 per cent, previous research has revealed.
This new study, from Trinity College, involved 135 women and helps to shine a light on the scale of brain injury among domestic violence survivors – although in both sport and interpersonal violence, brain injuries can be difficult to estimate due to under-reporting and a lack of formal diagnosis.
Researchers worked with 50 survivors of interpersonal violence, 50 individuals who had not experienced interpersonal violence, and 25 victims of sexual assault.
In the study, the average number of hits sustained to the head reported by survivors was ten, with a high of 100. In addition to blows, many of the participants had experienced non-fatal strangulation, which can also result in brain trauma, wrote the authors. Strangulation is defined as the application of external pressure to the throat either by hands or an object.
To determine the traumatic brain injury likelihood—a type of injury which cannot easily be determined by scans or medical tests—researchers studied the cognitive performance of all participants.
Using Centers for Disease Control criteria, the researchers found 60 per cent of the interpersonal violence survivors had potential traumatic brain injuries.
Women with a history of interpersonal violence demonstrated significantly lower scores on measures of verbal fluency, executive functioning, and memory recall as compared with women with a history of sexual assault. Among those, the women who had experienced strangulation demonstrated the lowest performance.
The interpersonal violence survivors also demonstrated significantly higher levels of depression, anxiety, and PTSD than the group not exposed to interpersonal violence.
Most previous studies of repetitive head injuries have looked at athletes who are physically fit, are diagnosed quickly, and receive immediate care.
That is a dramatic contrast to interpersonal violence survivors, where only about half of the survivors studied had received medical treatment for their injuries, and those were primarily for emergency services.
The dearth of research on traumatic brain injuries in abuse survivors is likely due to the dual difficulty of low reporting to law enforcement and low levels of medical intervention due to fear of their attacker, fear of leaving children alone, and stigma, said researchers.
The study spotlights the need for healthcare providers and those working to support in situations of domestic violence to be aware of, and actively look for, symptoms of traumatic brain injury when working with victims of interpersonal violence.
Deficits from traumatic brain injuries could impede a survivor’s ability to respond and to extricate herself from the dangerous situation, the authors said.
More research is needed, the researchers said. The study was limited to women who are English-speaking, which does not represent the diversity of the country’s population. For example, immigrants may be particularly isolated by the factors related to their status, increasing their rates of traumatic brain injuries, they noted.
Further, while most interpersonal violence victims are women, much is unknown about the impact of traumatic brain injuries on women.
