The first cohort study of its kind conducted by to demonstrate an association between domestic abuse and the development of Joht Singh Chandan, academic clinical fellow on the West Midlands public health registrar training scheme at the University of Birmingham, U.K., and colleagues reports that women who survived domestic abuse were found to be at greater risk for developing CVD, type 2 diabetes and all-cause mortality compared with women who did not experience abuse.

      According to research published in the Go Red for Women issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association, women who have been noted by general practitioners who had a domestic abuse exposure experienced increased risk for CVD (adjusted incidence rate ratio [aIRR] = 1.31; 95% CI, 1.11-1.55), subsequent type 2 diabetes (aIRR = 1.51; 95% CI, 1.3-1.76) and all-cause mortality (aIRR = 1.44; 95% CI, 1.24-1.67) when compared to women who were not exposed to domestic abuse.

      For this retrospective cohort study, researchers examined the data obtained from the Health Improvement Network database to identify women coded with previous exposure to domestic abuse (mean age, 37 years; mean follow-up, 2 years) between 1995 and 2017. Overall, 18 547 women exposed to DA were matched to 72 231 unexposed women by age and lifestyle factors.

      This study restates the relationship between exposure to domestic abuse and the development of type 2 diabetes, even after taking into account the impact of contributing lifestyle risk factors, and identifies this population as having higher risk of all-cause mortality.”

      “Given the sizeable population that these results may affect, physicians should pay particular notice to managing risk factors for CVD and type 2 diabetes in this group,” the researchers wrote. “Further studies in other cohorts are needed to confirm this relationship, and basic scientific research is required to understand the biological plausibility of the associations between domestic abuse exposure and the subsequent development of cardiometabolic disease.”