Stroke risk in later life increases if parents have divorced. Photo / 123rf
Stroke risk in later life increases if parents have divorced. Photo / 123rf
Adults whose parents divorced when they were children are more likely to suffer a stroke in later life, a study suggests.
Experts are unsure what is driving the increased risk but believe a flood of stress hormones in childhood may bring long-lasting health impacts.
Survey responses from more than 13,000 people aged 65 and older were studied by US and Canadian researchers who found those whose parents divorced were about 60% more likely to have had a stroke.
One in nine whose parents had divorced reported that they had been diagnosed with a stroke, compared with one in 15 of those whose parents had stayed together.
Professor Esme Fuller-Thomson, of the University of Toronto, said: “We need to shed light on the mechanisms that may contribute to this association.”
Stress hormones in childhood may bring long-lasting health impacts, researchers believe. Photo / 123rf
She added: “From a biological embedding perspective, having your parents split up during childhood could lead to sustained high levels of stress hormones.
“Experiencing this as a child could have lasting influences on the developing brain and a child’s ability to respond to stress.”
The people involved in the study were born before 1960, and just 13.9% had experienced parental divorce during their childhood.
However, today in Britain, about 31% of children come from homes where their parents have split up.
Stroke risk in later life increases if parents have divorced. Photo / 123rf
Researchers took into account other known risk factors for stroke, including smoking, physical inactivity, lower income and education, diabetes, depression and low social support, but still found a clear link to divorce.
The divorce risk was found to be of a similar magnitude to diabetes, being male and suffering from depression.
Dr Philip Baiden, an associate professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington, said: “We found that even when people hadn’t experienced childhood physical and sexual abuse and had at least one adult who made them feel safe in their childhood home, they still were more likely to have a stroke if their parents had divorced.”
Other forms of childhood adversity were found not to be significantly associated with stroke in this study, including emotional abuse, neglect, household mental illness and substance abuse or exposure to parental domestic violence.
About 100,000 people have strokes in the UK each year and there are 1.3 million stroke survivors.
The researchers concluded that in future, divorce could be added to the known risk factors for stroke and used by health professionals to target individuals for prevention programmes.
Fuller-Thomson added: “It is extremely concerning that older adults who grew up in divorced families had 60% higher odds of stroke, even after excluding those who had been physically or sexually abused as children.
“The magnitude of the association between parental divorce and stroke was comparable to well-established risk factors for stroke such as male gender and having diabetes.”
