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Action on Smoking and Health
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Women Sexually Abused as Children are More Likely to Smoke [04/15-2]
Excerpts from: Women sexually abused in childhood more prone to smoking: study
Yahoo News [04/15/04]
Women physically or sexually abused as children are 40 percent more likely to become smokers than women who have not been abused, says a study published by a US medical journal.
Women who suffered physical and sexual abuse before the age of 11 were three and a half times as likely to become smokers as other women, said the findings in the latest issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Risk factors for abuse included poverty, coming from a working class family, and religion.
The research team based its findings on 722 women aged between 36 and 45 who completed a questionnaire as part of a Harvard study on serious depression and the menopause.
Just over one in four of the women said they had been abused as a child. Most had been physically abused. Three percent had been both physically and sexually abused. One in six women said they had lived in fear of being abused as a child.
Those who had endured both types of abuse were more than three times as likely to take up smoking, while women who had been sexually abused were twice as likely to do so.
The researchers were led by Bernard Harlow, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, USA.
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