There are identifiable risk factors for intimate partner femicides.

Clinicians should not be falsely reassured by a woman's sense of safety, by the lack of a history of severe violence, or by the presence of few classic risk factors for homicide. Efforts to reduce femicide risk that are targeted only at those women seeking help for violence-related problems may miss potential victims.

Women who reported both probable TBI and IPV were more likely than their abused counterparts who reported no TBI to report CNS symptoms. This relationship held true even when controlling for symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Clinicians working with women should be aware of TBI as a possible etiology for symptoms in abused women. Appropriate screening and treatment protocols should be designed and implemented across medical settings to improve outcomes for women who have experienced IPV and TBI.

This study sought to determine the risk of low birth weight from intimate partner abuse. The case-control design was used in a purposively ethnically stratified multisite sample of 1,004 women interviewed during the 72 hours after delivery between 1991 and 1996. Abuse was determined by the Index of Spouse Abuse and a modification of the Abuse Assessment Screen. Separate analyses were conducted for 252 full term and 326 preterm infants. The final multiple logistic regression models were constructed to determine relative risk for low birth weight after controlling for other complications of pregnancy. Physical and nonphysical abuse as determined by the Index of Spouse Abuse were both significant risk factors for low birth weight for the full term infants but not the preterm infants on a bivariate level. However, the risk estimates decreased in significance in the adjusted models. Although today's short delivery stays make it difficult to assess for abuse, it is necessary to screen for domestic violence at delivery, especially for women who may not have obtained prenatal care. The unadjusted significant risk for low birth weight that became nonsignificant when adjusted suggests that other abuse-related maternal health problems (notably low weight gain and poor obstetric history) are confounders (or mediators) that help to explain the relation between abuse and low birth weight in full term infants.