Network Map of Adverse Health Effects Among Victims of Intimate Partner Violence

Kathleen Whiting¹, Larry Y. Liu², Mehmet Koyutürk³, Günnur Karakurt⁴

¹Neuroscience Program, Uniformed Services University
²Center of Proteomics and Bioinformatics, Case Western Reserve University
³Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Case Western Reserve University
⁴Department of Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University
Email: kathleen.whiting@usuhs.edu, lyl14@case.edu, mxk331@case.edu, gkk6@case.edu

Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 22:324-335(2017)

© 2017 World Scientific
Open Access chapter published by World Scientific Publishing Company and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License.

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious problem with devastating health consequences. Screening procedures may overlook relationships between IPV and negative health effects. To identify IPV-associated women's health issues, we mined national, aggregated de-identified electronic health record data and compared female health issues of domestic abuse (DA) versus non-DA records, identifying terms significantly more frequent for the DA group. After coding these terms into 28 broad categories, we developed a network map to determine strength of relationships between categories in the context of DA, finding that acute conditions are strongly connected to cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, gynecological, and neurological conditions among victims.