Psychiatric–Medical ComorbidityThe role of cumulative sexual trauma and difficulties identifying feelings in understanding female veterans' physical health outcomes
Section snippets
Participants and data collection
In 2002, we conducted an anonymous cross-sectional mailed survey of 1500 women veterans who had received health care from a Women Veterans Comprehensive Health Care Clinic located within a Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2001. The Women's Clinic uses a primary care model to provide comprehensive, integrated, multidisciplinary medical care for women veterans. Women were randomly selected from a list of all female patients enrolled in a VAMC
Participant characteristics
Demographic characteristics of the 456 female veterans in the sample are presented in Table 1. As shown in Table 2, sexual victimization experiences were commonly reported by women veterans. Overall, 57.5% of participants (n=262) reported experiencing some type of sexual victimization in their lifetime. Nearly half of female veterans reported sexual victimization experiences before the age of 18 (45.8%), one third reported sexual victimization after the age of 18 (32.2%) and nearly one quarter
Discussion
In this sample of female veterans, self-reported emotion recognition skill deficits were associated with both physical health complaints and the use of acute urgent care services. Even after controlling for predisposing, enabling and need-based factors, such as health risk behaviors (e.g., smoking, exercise and obesity, medical comorbidities, depression and alcohol abuse), history of cumulative sexual trauma exposure, and PTSD symptoms, we found that difficulties identifying feelings remained
Acknowledgments
Drs. Polusny and Murdoch are core investigators for the Center for Chronic Disease Outcomes Research (CCDOR). CCDOR is a VA Health Services and Research Service Center of Excellence. Portions of this study were presented at the 36th Annual Convention of the Association for the Advancement of Behavioral Therapy in Reno, Nevada, 2002. The authors would like to acknowledge the following individuals for their assistance with this project: Linda Van Egeren, Ph.D.; Jessica Schultz; Rachel Schultze;
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