Rationale:

• The mental health burden suffered after a sexual assault can be disabling for patients, and effective treatments exist.
• Early intervention helps reduce psychological damage and speeds the healing process.
• Although immediate treatment is preferred, patients with a history of remote sexual assault often continue to suffer, and these patients should be referred for follow-up psychological treatment if they disclose the assault.

Evidence:

• Rape trauma syndrome is a pattern of symptoms, similar to PTSD, first termed by researchers after doing a qualitative observational study of patients who had been raped and who presented to Boston City Hospital (59).
• A brief cognitive-behavioral program instituted immediately after assault showed dramatic efficacy in the prevention of chronic PTSD in a prospective observational study of 10 patients compared to a nonrandomized historical control group of 10 patients (61).
• Imagery rehearsal therapy was shown to help with chronic nightmares, improve sleep quality, and decrease PTSD symptom severity in sexual assault patients in one randomized controlled trial of 168 women (62).
• Another study that looked at long-term follow-up in 38 women over 2 years found that multimodal group therapy reduced PTSD symptoms in sexually assaulted women (63).

Comments:

• None.