About 3 percent of 12- to 17-year-old girls are physically or sexually assaulted by a boyfriend or date, a US study suggests.

    In interviews with a nationally representative sample of US teens, researchers found that 2.7 percent of girls and 0.6 percent of boys said they had been the victim of serious dating violence - including physical abuse, sexual assault or being threatened with a weapon.

    The findings offer some insight into the prevalence of the problem, as well as some of its consequences, according to lead researcher Kate B. Wolitzky-Taylor who is now at the University of Texas at Austin.

    She and her colleagues at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, found that teenagers who said they had been the victims of dating violence were nearly four times more likely to have experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression.

    "Overall, these findings suggest that dating violence in adolescence is a significant public health issue to address, particularly for older adolescent girls," the researchers report in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

    The study did not look at less-severe forms of violence, such as being shoved or slapped without injury, and it did not assess verbal abuse. So the percentage of teenagers in abusive relationships may be much higher.