The Relationship of Child Abuse and Functional Constipation in Children: A Case-Control Study

Background: child abuse is a serious global problem and can be in the form of physical, sexual, emotional or neglect by not providing for the child's needs. functional constipation (fc) is a common functional gastrointestinal (gi) disorder in children. this study was aimed to assess the relationship between child abuse and functional constipation in children. materials and methods in this age frequency-matched case-control study, 100 children with fc were compared with 100 healthy children as control. the diagnosis of fc was based on history and physical examination. child abuse in three sub-groups (physical, emotional and neglect) were assessed by ispcan child abuse screening tool children's version (icast-c). the data were analyzed by stata software (version 13.0). results: the results of this study revealed that the frequency of any kind of child abuse in case (children with functional constipation), and control group (children without functional constipation) is 93% and 84%, respectively, or: 2.53 (95% ci: 1.00-6.45), p=0.052. the most frequent abuse in both groups was emotional abuse (91% vs. 81%) followed by physical (61% vs. 47%), and neglect (19% vs. 8%). there was a significant association between frequency of emotional (or: 2.37, p=0.046), physical (or: 1.76, p=0.048) and neglect abuse (or: 2.70, p=0.027) among case and control groups. however, after controlling the confounding variables, the association between child abuse and fc remained clinically important but was not statistically significant (p>0.05). conclusion notwithstanding emotional abuse, physical abuse and child neglect rate were more frequent among children with fc, this study demonstrates that child abuse is not associated with fc occurrence.