The largest brain autopsy study of women who had experienced intimate partner violence reveals substantial vascular and white matter damage in the brain, but no evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease recognized among male contact sports athletes who sustain repeated head trauma.
The international collaboration, led by a team from the Brain Injury Research Center of Mount Sinai in collaboration with the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, appears in the most recent issue of Acta Neuropathologica.
Importantly, the study also revealed substantial medical comorbidity, including cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, suggesting a need to consider a broad scope of pathology that underlies intimate partner violence-related brain injury, as well as the medical and psychiatric comorbidities that contribute to brain health during life.
Despite how common intimate partner violence is—it affects one in three women at some point in their lives—remarkably little is known about the neuropathology of partner violence. The long-term consequences of traumatic brain injury include the risk of neurodegenerative disease, and in the popular press and even in scientific discussions, there is an assumption that repeated head injuries sustained in the context of intimate partner violence are comparable to those sustained by male contact sports athletes.
"Because our team has been conducting research and clinical care with survivors of partner violence for years, we strongly suspected that the neuropathology of brain injury may be far more complex than assumed," said Kristen Dams-O'Connor, PhD, Director of the Brain Injury Research Center of Mount Sinai and lead author of the paper. "Through our unique collaboration with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner here in New York and international colleagues, we were able to shed light on this group that has been nearly absent from the medical literature."
The collaboration between the Brain Injury Research Center and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner dates from 2019, when the two entities solidified an unprecedented academic collaboration with the shared goal of identifying decedents with a history of traumatic brain injury for inclusion in the Late Effects of TBI (LETBI) brain donor program.
