Childhood sex abuse increases risk of heart disease

Women who had forced sex at young age have higher risk of heart disease, according to a study reported by Science News, with the main contributors being overweight and bad habits. The study, presented Sunday at a conference of the American Heart Association, analyzed data from more than 67,000 women aged between 25 and 42 when the study started in 1989, and tracked them for 18 years. About 56 percent higher risk of heart disease was found among the eleven percent women involved in the study who reported having "forced sexual activity" before age 17 than those who reported no history of sex abuse. “It’s clear that this association is strong,” said epidemiologist Donna Arnett of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, president-elect of the American Heart Association. “We need to do better job screening and identifying child sexual abuse at an early age.” The reasons why childhood sex abuse has such a high link with childhood sex abuse were that the abused women tend to become overweight, smoke, drink, have high blood pressure and diabetes, explains one of the authors Janet Rich-Edwards, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.