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Intimate Partner Violence During Recovery from an Orthopaedic Injury: An Exploratory, Prospective, Multicenter, Observational Cohort Study

PainSci » bibliography » Madden et al 2022
updated
Tags: injury, pain problems

One article on PainSci cites Madden 2022: Chronic Pain and Inequality

PainSci commentary on Madden 2022: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.

From an editorial by Dr. Sultan Al Maskari about this paper:

“The study presents a previously unknown fact that even women with no previous intimate partner violence experience are at an increased risk for IPV during their recovery from a musculoskeletal injury.”

Doesn’t seem to matter how cynical I get: it’s never enough for this world. 😡

It’s always good to have validation in the form of hard data, but of these scientists didn’t “discover” this anymore than Columbus “discovered” America. This was news to me, a man, but it certainly won’t be news to many or most women, who are already well aware of this phenomenon, and aware that it is just one of many examples of how women are mistreated by men, and how tangled up it is with health and healthcare. For instance, men also abandon sick female partners at dramatically higher rates than the other way around. Once again, we see that pain and social justice are inseparable topics.

~ Paul Ingraham

original abstract Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.

BACKGROUND: Orthopaedic injuries may lead to an increased incidence of intimate partner violence (IPV) during recovery as people dependent on others' help are at a higher risk for abuse. Additionally, there is a lack of understanding of how IPV affects injury recovery. In women being treated for an orthopaedic injury, we aimed to determine the number of new IPV disclosures in the 12 months after an injury and to explore the impact of IPV on recovery.

METHODS: We enrolled 250 female participants from 6 orthopaedic fracture clinics in Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and Finland. IPV disclosure and clinical outcomes were assessed at the initial visit and during the 12-month follow-up period.

RESULTS: Of 250 participants, 81 (32.4% [95% confidence interval (CI), 26.6% to 38.2%]) had a history of IPV in their lifetime and disclosed this at their initial orthopaedic clinic appointment. Twenty-one participants (12.4% [95% CI, 7.5% to 17.8%]) who did not disclose abuse at the initial visit disclosed IPV during the follow-up. In our a priori unadjusted analysis, disclosure of IPV at the initial appointment or a subsequent follow-up appointment was associated with a 32% lower likelihood of returning to a pre-injury level of function with no restrictions regarding responsibilities at home (hazard ratio, 0.68 [95% CI, 0.46 to 0.99]; p = 0.046). Participants disclosing IPV had lower health-related quality of life on the EuroQol-5 Dimensions (EQ-5D) at the 6-month-follow-up, with adjusted mean differences of -5.3 (95% CI, -10.2 to -0.4, p = 0.04) for the visual analog scale and -0.06 (95% CI, -0.11 to -0.01; p = 0.02) for the Function Index. They also had lower Function Index scores at the final 12-month follow-up visit, with an adjusted mean difference of -0.06 (95% CI, -0.10 to -0.02; p = 0.006).

CONCLUSIONS: A surprisingly high percentage of women disclosed IPV within 12 months after the injury. Our exploratory results suggest that women who disclose IPV may have lower health-related quality of life. This study supports the need to optimize orthopaedic clinics to provide appropriate support for asking about and assisting individuals who experienced IPV. Additional research is warranted to further explore these findings.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Prognostic Level II. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.

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