Parental Death Due To Natural Death Causes During Childhood Abbreviates The Time To A Diagnosis Of A Psychiatric Disorder In The Offspring : A Follow-Up Study

• Main Author: Ru00e4su00e4nen, Sami
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: Morressier 2017
• Subjects: demo; psy; Meier; Northern Finland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.26226/morressier.5c642be19ae8fb00131cea71; https://openresearchlibrary.org/ext/api/media/e898ea72-b68c-4a7f-a868-80a69f4db135/assets/external_content.pdf; https://openresearchlibrary.org/viewer/e898ea72-b68c-4a7f-a868-80a69f4db135

Background and Aims: Approximately five percent of children face a parentu2019s death before reaching adulthood, which has been shown to increase the offspringu2019s risk of poor health outcomes and adverse social consequences. We aimed to find out whether a parentu2019s death abbreviates time to a diagnosis of psychiatric disorders in the offspring and to study the effect of the most common death causes on this association.Methods:Data from various national registers on the time and cause of parentsu2019 deaths and on the time of psychiatric disorder diagnoses of the offspring up to 28 years of age were collected for a sample from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986 (422 with parental death before their 18th birthday, and 6,172 matched controls). We compared the time to diagnoses between those with and without parental death using Kaplan-Meier and Cox regression analyses.Results:Of parental deaths, 334 (79.1%) were due to natural and 84 (19.9%) due to unnatural causes. The cohort members with parental death were given a diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder earlier than their controls (10-year survival proportions: 88.6% vs. 93.1%, p=0.001). The corresponding survival proportions were 88.3% vs. 93.8% (p=0.001) for natural causes and 89.2% vs. 90.6% (p=0.284) for unnatural causes.Conclusions:Our findings indicate that parental death due to natural causes associates increasingly with psychiatric diagnoses of the affected offspring. Psychosocial support must be provided as early as when a parent falls ill, especially with those illnesses that are the most common causes of death in the population.