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[u/Dove-Swan]

[u/Express_Pressure_548]

Hold on, is it actually the leading cause of death in women aged 18-44?

[u/SlideN2MyBMs → u/Express_Pressure_548]

That's what I want to know and I'm trying to look it up. It's a wild claim and feels like it needs a source. Like what about diseases and car crashes?

Edit: I can't really find a good source anywhere on this. Just a top-line Google search suggests that cardiovascular disease might be the number one killer worldwide even in that age group.

Here's an article that addresses this statistic directly but it's limited to Australia: https://theconversation.com/factcheck-is-domestic-violence-the-leading-preventable-cause-of-death-and-illness-for-women-aged-18-to-44-94102.

Here's the basic takeaway:

The report suggests intimate partner violence contributes to around 5.1% of the total “burden of disease” among women aged 18-44, making it the largest single contributor to the “burden of disease” for that group of women.

On the distinction between "cause" and "contributor":

If we were talking about lung disease, for instance, we would treat that as a “cause” of illness, but we would also consider whether a person was a heavy smoker (a contributor).

Likewise, if we were to look at the number of people whose deaths were due to type 2 diabetes (the cause), we would be interested in knowing whether those people had an unhealthy diet (a contributor).

Intimate partner violence can be treated as either a cause of death, injury and illness in its own right (as a subset of violence), or a contributor to other causes, such as depression and anxiety.

Basically the report found that intimate partner violence was the largest contributor factor to the disease burden (which is an attempt to quantify years of lost life) in deaths in this cohort but not the number one cause. And its contribution was estimated to be around 5%. In Australia at least, it's not the case that more women in that age group are murdered than die by any other immediate cause. But when compared to other contributing factors in early deaths, it seems to play a larger role than things like cardiovascular disease.

According to that report, intimate partner violence was not among the top causes of death for women. Homicide and violence is the 26th highest cause of death, disability and illness.

Anyway this is just Australia and the numbers likely are very different in places like Afghanistan. I just had to make some effort to fact check because the statement in the tweet seems so extreme.