Sexual assault history and medical care seeking: The roles of symptom prevalence and illness behavior

Persons with a history of sexual assault seek more health care than do othe rs. The present study explored whether this difference is due to poorer hea lth or a unique pattern of illness behavior among assaulted persons. Interv iews were conducted with 6125 randomly selected residents of two communitie s. Data were disaggregated into overlapping subsets of persons who reported each of 21 symptoms (e.g., abdominal pain, nausea, chest pain, palpitation s, headache, back pain). Assaulted and non-assaulted persons were equally l ikely to seek medical care for 18 of the 21 symptoms. Among those who sough t care, assault was not related to whether symptoms were medically explaine d. Taken together, the results suggest that associations of sexual assault with medical care seeking are largely due to poorer health of assaulted per sons.