Women who experience sexual violence, workplace sexual harassment or both have a higher long-term risk of developing high blood pressure than women with no such trauma, according to new research.
Hypertension is a key risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is the top killer of women, causing 1 in 3 deaths each year, the American Heart Association reports.
Statistics show that up to 44% of women report sexual assault and up to 80% of women report workplace sexual harassment, yet this exposure is “not widely recognized as a contributor to women’s cardiovascular health,” said study author Rebecca Lawn, a postdoctoral research fellow in epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, in a statement.
“In a sense, the body is telling the story,” Nancy Krieger, author of the 2008 study, told CNN in a former interview. Krieger is a professor of social epidemiology, in the department of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
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“Not everyone is able and willing to identify what happened to them, but that doesn’t prevent the body from having opinions about it and expressing them,” said Krieger, who directs Chan’s interdisciplinary concentration on women, gender and health.
