Domestic violence and abuse increase risk of atopic illness

A new study published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice suggests that domestic abuse and violence are serious global public health problems.

According to estimates, domestic violence and abuse (DVA) affects up to one in three women worldwide and one in four women in the United Kingdom during the course of their lifetimes. DVA is a type of gender-based violence rooted in gender inequity that disproportionately impacts women, even though it can affect anybody. According to data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, women over the age of 16 are twice as likely as males to have had a DVA. As a result, Katrina Nash and colleagues carried out this investigation to look at the relationship between DVA exposure and the eventual emergence of atopy.

IQVIA Medical Research Data, an anonymized UK primary care dataset, helped us locate women without a history of atopic disorder between January 1, 1995 and September 30, 2019, for this population-based, retrospective, open cohort investigation. We compared exposed and unexposed patients by age and deprivation quintile and utilized clinical codes to identify exposed patients (those with a code identifying exposure to DVA; n = 13,852) and unexposed patients (n = 49,036). The risk ratios (HRs) (with 95% CIs) of acquiring asthma, atopic eczema, or allergic rhinoconjunctivitis were calculated using Cox proportional hazards regression.

The key findings of this study were:

In contrast to 2,607 women who were not exposed (incidence rate, 13.24/1,000 person-years), 967 exposed women (incidence rate, 20.10/1,000 person-years) had atopic illness over the research period.

Taking into consideration important variables such as atopic eczema (adjusted HR = 1.40; 95% CI, 1.26-1.56), asthma (adjusted HR = 1.69; 95% CI, 1.44-1.99), and allergic rhinoconjunctivitis (adjusted HR = 1.63; 95% CI, 1.45-1.84), the adjusted HR came to 1.52 (95% CI, 1.41-1.64).

According to earlier observational data, women who are exposed to DVA have a higher chance of having atopic illness. Therefore, it is urgently necessary to put into place systematic public health measures, adopt the consideration of DVA in clinical interactions with patients who present with illness, and encourage public health professionals to support measures to prevent DVA in wider society and its grave downstream effects.

Reference:

Nash, K., Minhas, S., Metheny, N., Gokhale, K. M., Taylor, J., Bradbury-Jones, C., Bandyopadhyay, S., Nirantharakumar, K., Adderley, N. J., & Chandan, J. S. (2023). Exposure to Domestic Abuse and the Subsequent Development of Atopic Disease in Women. In The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice (Vol. 11, Issue 6, pp. 1752-1756.e3). Elsevier BV. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaip.2023.03.016