Intimate Partner Violence and Head Trauma

A large proportion of women exposed to intimate partner violence (IPV) experience brain injury (BI), and although IPV has been associated with numerous individual, social, and cultural factors, no single factor has consistently predicted either the use of, or experience of, violence within intimate relationships. The experience of IPV and IPV-related BI is often associated with significant mental health concerns, particularly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and common cognitive sequelae generally include deficits in attention, working memory, executive functioning, processing speed, response inhibition, and memory. Furthermore, there is evidence that the myriad of cognitive and psychological problems associated with BI may also increase the risk of future IPV perpetration. Accurate characterization of lifetime exposure to both IPV and IPV-related BI are needed to fully understand the effects of trauma on well-being. To comprehensively characterize and quantify cumulative lifetime exposure to head trauma and predict long-term prognosis, a holistic approach to screening and assessment of IPV-related BI that incorporates well-validated, all-cause BI tools, supplemented with structured recall cues and measures of childhood and other lifetime trauma exposures, are necessary.