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A Family Study of Adult Twins with and without a History of Childhood Abuse: Stability of Retrospective Reports of Maltreatment and Associated Family Measures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

Elliot C. Nelson*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, United States of America. nelsone@wustl.edu
Michael T. Lynskey
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, United States of America.
Andrew C. Heath
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, United States of America.
Pamela A. F. Madden
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, United States of America.
Nicholas G. Martin
Affiliation:
Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Australia.
*
*Address for correspondence: Elliot C. Nelson, M.D., Midwest Alcoholism Research Center, Washington University School of Medicine, Dept. of Psychiatry, 4560 Clayton Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63110, United States of America.

Abstract

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Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and physical abuse (CPA) are well-established risk-factors for a wide of range of proximal and distal outcomes. The lack of availability of an optimal design for examining abuse and its consequences has resulted in the use of various approaches, each having its own limitations. We describe the Childhood Trauma Study, which ascertained families from a large young adult Australian twin cohort on the basis of twins' responses to screening questions assessing CSA and CPA. We report data from 3407 participants including twins, non-twin siblings, and their parents. Our data demonstrate the feasibility of using a comprehensive assessment to evaluate retrospective history of childhood abuse in an adult sample. We observed that risk for each form of abuse increased incrementally with the number of parents with alcohol problems. Psychometric properties of our measures of CSA and CPA including reasonable long-term stability, construct validity, and evidence of familial corroboration compare favorably with those of other reports in which samples were considerably younger and assessments were repeated over shorter intervals.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010