New research has established a link between obesity in black women and sexual and physical abuse in childhood, according to the Los Angeles Times.
This study “was the first… to look at a large group of African American women for this association,” the newspaper states, “which has been found among women in previous studies, the researchers from Boston University said in the August issue of the journal Pediatrics.”
Data culled from an ongoing project called the Black Women’s Health Study found that 11 percent of 33,298 women polled in 2005 had been severely sexually or physically abused; 58 percent had experienced at least one instance of maltreatment. (A previous study placed the rate of sexual abuse experienced by black women at 60 percent.)
Boston University researchers found that severe childhood abuse was associated with depression, smoking, and being overweight in adulthood. Marriage and economic stability for black women had an inverse relationship to the level of abuse experienced.
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SOURCE: The Grio
Alexis Garrett Stodghill
