A new study links physical violence against women by their male partners to disruption of a key stress hormone, which could lead to a variety of negative health effects.

The study by the University of Oregon and the Oregon Social Learning Center looked at daily fluctuations in cortisol levels in men and women. Cortisol was drawn from saliva samples of 122 couples during on-site assessments and four times a day — upon waking up, 30 minutes later, in mid to late afternoon and at bedtime — over four consecutive days.

Cortisol levels typically rise as people wake up, peak shortly after and then decline rapidly, the researchers noted.

Researchers then compared the cortisol levels with the frequency of interpersonal violence as reported by both partners in the relationships.

They noted a disruption from normal diurnal (daily) cortisol rhythms only in women as seen by a slower decline through the afternoons and higher-than-normal levels late in the day.

For years, researchers have suspected that the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) regulatory system, which controls cortisol production in response to stress, is adversely influenced by violence.

“Existing studies have focused on the women’s HPA-axis activity only,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Hyoun K. Kim, a scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center and courtesy researcher in the University of Oregon Department of Psychology.

“We indeed found that women’s, but not men’s, victimization was associated with multiple indicators of diurnal cortisol levels,” she said. “It has been argued that interpersonal violence is more detrimental for women than for men, and our study suggests that it might indeed be due to disruptions in HPA-axis activity.”

Men in the study were recruited in 1983, when they were nine to 10 years old, for the Oregon Social Learning Center’s longitudinal Oregon Youth Study. They were drawn from mostly lower socioeconomic status families living in neighborhoods with higher-than-average juvenile delinquency.

Their romantic partners were incorporated in a separate couples’ study when the men reached 17 to 18 years of age. Dr. Deborah M. Capaldi, a research scientist at the Oregon Social Learning Center, is the principal investigator of that study.

The study’s duration and large community-based sample size — not just data from women seeking help at shelters as in similar studies — make for robust findings, according to J. Josh Snodgrass, a biological anthropologist at the university.

“We think we captured a good window on the subjects’ everyday rhythms,” said Snodgrass, who was invited by the non-profit center to coordinate cortisol sampling and analysis.

“There are fluctuations, such as may occur on a very bad day, but it’s minor and on the margins — they are easy to weed out when you have four days. It’s a high-quality sample. We think it’s the environmental and behavioral pieces that are influencing the cortisol rhythms.”

The findings show a correlation between violence and cortisol levels in women, according to the researchers. However, they do not rule out the possibility that abnormal cortisol cycling may contribute to interpersonal violence.

“There are studies that show that dysregulated HPA axis activity is related to behavioral problems in children,” Kim said. “We cited some studies that showed that cortisol is related to interpersonal violence in men, but that finding is also based on a cross-sectional design with a very small sample of violent men and limited methods.”

The researchers are now looking at the women’s daily cortisol rhythms for connections to subsequent physical and psychological outcomes to confirm a gender specific vulnerability to interpersonal violence in relationships, Kim added.

The study, published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, was supported by grants from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and National Institute of Child Health and Development.

Source: University of Oregon



Woman being abused photo by shutterstock.

Physical Violence Tied to Disruption of Stress Hormone in Women