Results of a national study led by public health scientist Elizabeth Evans at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with others at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the University of California, Los Angeles, suggest that risk for alcohol and drug use disorders among United States military veterans is increased by childhood adversity, and in ways that are different between women and men and different compared to the civilian population.
Evans, an assistant professor of health promotion and policy at UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, says that in the general population, fewer women than men have an alcohol or drug use disorder. "Veterans are different in that there is no gender difference in the prevalence of these problems," she explains. "Among veterans a similar proportion of women and men - about 37 percent - have ever had an alcohol or drug use disorder."
She adds, "This finding that women veterans are similar to men veterans and are so different from civilian women, is unexpected. Also surprising are the high rates of childhood adversity among veterans, especially among women; 68 percent of women veterans report some childhood adversity, and they have the highest rates of childhood sexual abuse." Study results appear in a recent early online edition of Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology and will be in print this year.
[For more on this story by University of Massachusetts Amherst, go to https://medicalxpress.com/news...erans-childhood.html]
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