Two different studies found women abused in childhood to have a risk of developing endometriosis in adulthood.

A 20 percent to 50 percent higher risk of developing endometriosis in women with a past of sexual or emotional abuse was observed by a European study published in the journal, Human Reproduction. Similarly, a large U.S. study in the same journal yielded matching results with sexual or physical abuse in the past.

“We decided to do this study because there is increasing evidence that childhood maltreatment has a serious impact on many adult diseases,” said senior author of the European study, Dr. Brigitte Leeners, a researcher at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland.

“Childhood maltreatment is often an underestimated and un-investigated risk factor for different adult diseases,” Leeners said in an email.

421 women with and without endometriosis each were compared by Leeners and her team. These women visited the same healthcare clinics at university hospitals and private doctor’s clinics in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

All of them responded to a childhood trauma questionnaire, according to which, the researchers concluded that women with endometriosis more frequently accounted for being sexually and/or emotionally abused, emotionally neglected and experienced inconsistency in childhood.

Data from the Nurses’ Health Study II, from the U.S., revealed that in more than 60,000 women who answered questionnaires on lifetime exposure to violence, around 3,400 developed endometriosis through 24 years of follow-up.
The study team found that the risk of developing endometriosis was 10 percent greater in women with a history of physical abuse compared to women with a negative history and 15 percent with those who suffered sexual abuse. A 31 percent higher risk of endometriosis was linked with women who were both physically and sexually abused in their childhood.