BACKGROUND

WHO informed that across world an average of 565 young people aged 10 to 29 die every day through interpersonal violence. Some studies mentioned that anxiety was most frequently occurred as one of the psychological consequences among victims of child abuse. Recent research on effects of adverse early life experiences on central nervous system as stress systems (hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis-HPA) has provided a greater understanding of the link between childhood abuse and susceptibility to anxiety disorder. Therefore, this research was done to study anxiety among abused adolescents, some physical parameters and level of cortisol in saliva.

 

MATERIALS AND METHOD

There were selected 20 abused children and 40 non abused children aged between 11-16 years old and lived in Ulaanbaatar city. The Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS; Spence, 1997) is a 38-item self-report questionnaire that assesses multiple symptoms of childhood anxiety disorders based on current diagnostic criteria. All participants were measured the cortisol in the saliva by Cortisol ELISA kit, Sigma, USA.

 

RESULTS

Average age of all subjects in the study was 13.52±1.57 and 59% of them were female and 41% were male. All anxiety symptoms of case group was statistically significance higher (p<0.01) than control group. The average amount of salivary cortisol of case group was (18.65±7.08) statistically significantly lower (p<0.01) than average amount of control group (32.15±20.99).

 

CONCLUSION

Anxiety was more frequently occurred among abused children and blunted cortisol responses might indicate a level of impaired HPA functioning that could constitute a vulnerability to psychopathology with exposure to anxiety.

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