By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Older African American women exposed to high levels of family violence feel physically and mentally worse than their peers who have experienced less violence in their lives, according to a study in the Journal of Women's Health.

"There's a definite link between being exposed to different types of violence in the home as an adult and worse health status," Dr. Anuradha Paranjape of Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, who led the study, told Reuters Health.

But while these women perceived their mental and physical health as being worse, they actually had the same number of health problems as women exposed to less violence, Paranjape noted.

The bulk of research on the health effects of family violence has focused on younger female victims of intimate partner violence, Paranjape and her colleagues note. But researchers are now beginning to look at how this kind of violence, as well as abuse by other family members, affects older women's health. Paranjape has developed a 29-item scale to measure both domestic violence and elder abuse.

In the current study, Paranjape and her team interviewed 158 African-American women aged 50 and older who were visiting a clinic at a public hospital.

While just a small fraction of the women said they were currently victims of family violence, almost 28 percent of them had a high lifetime exposure to family violence based on their scores on Paranjape's scale. Their scores on a test measuring their physical well being averaged about 35, compared to 40 for women who experienced no violence or little violence, while their mental well-being scores were about 42, compared to 48 for the rest of the women.

"Our findings are striking in that the overall health status of those who have experienced high levels of family violence is much lower than published norms for both African Americans and women in general but is similar to the health status of a chronically ill, economically disadvantaged population," the researchers point out in their report.

The only other factor that affected the study participants' mental and physical well being to the same degree was being out of work.

The next step will be to figure out why women who have faced more family violence feel worse, and learn how to help them, Paranjape said.

SOURCE: Journal of Women's Health, February 2009.

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