Although increasing women's levels of education is crucial to reducing IPV for women, proximate educational context is also an important factor in reducing this public health burden.

Domestic violence has harmful physical and psychological health correlates, but there is little evidence regarding a relation between domestic violence and malnutrition. To investigate this relation, the authors analyzed data from 69,072 women aged 15-49 years and 14,552 children aged 12-35 months in the 1998-1999 Indian National Family Health Survey. Physical domestic violence victimization was self-reported by the women. Aspects of nutritional status included in this study were anemia and underweight. Anemia was measured with a blood test for hemoglobin. Underweight was calculated from anthropometric measurements and was determined as body mass index for women, and it included stunting and wasting for children. Results indicate associations of multiple incidents of domestic violence in the previous year with anemia (odds ratio = 1.11, 95% confidence interval: 1.04, 1.18) and underweight (odds ratio = 1.21, 95% confidence interval: 1.13, 1.29) in women and a suggested relation among children. Possible mechanisms for this relation include withholding of food as a form of abuse and stress-mediated influences of domestic violence on nutritional outcomes. These findings indicate that reducing domestic violence is important not only from a moral and intrinsic perspective but also because of the instrumental health benefits likely to accrue.

BackgroundWhile mass media communications can be an important source of health information, there are substantial social disparities in health knowledge that may be related to media use. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the use of cancer-related health communications is patterned by race, ethnicity, language, and social class.Methodology/Principal FindingsIn a nationally-representative cross-sectional telephone survey, 5,187 U.S. adults provided information about demographic characteristics, cancer information seeking, and attention to and trust in health information from television, radio, newspaper, magazines, and the Internet. Cancer information seeking was lowest among Spanish-speaking Hispanics (odds ratio: 0.42; 95% confidence interval: 0.28–0.63) compared to non-Hispanic whites. Spanish-speaking Hispanics were more likely than non-Hispanic whites to pay attention to (odds ratio: 3.10; 95% confidence interval: 2.07–4.66) and trust (odds ratio: 2.61; 95% confidence interval: 1.53–4.47) health messages from the radio. Non-Hispanic blacks were more likely than non-Hispanic whites to pay attention to (odds ratio: 2.39; 95% confidence interval: 1.88–3.04) and trust (odds ratio: 2.16; 95% confidence interval: 1.61–2.90) health messages on television. Those who were college graduates tended to pay more attention to health information from newspapers (odds ratio: 1.98; 95% confidence interval: 1.42–2.75), magazines (odds ratio: 1.86; 95% confidence interval: 1.32–2.60), and the Internet (odds ratio: 4.74; 95% confidence interval: 2.70–8.31) and had less trust in cancer-related health information from television (odds ratio: 0.44; 95% confidence interval: 0.32–0.62) and radio (odds ratio: 0.54; 95% confidence interval: 0.34–0.86) compared to those who were not high school graduates.Conclusions/SignificanceHealth media use is patterned by race, ethnicity, language and social class. Providing greater access to and enhancing the quality of health media by taking into account factors associated with social determinants may contribute to addressing social disparities in health.