The New Health Care: When Children Lose Siblings, They Face an Increased Risk of Death
http://ift.tt/2uNh1Ef Another factor could be the emotional impact and its effects on mental health, especially in the short term. Children who lose their parents are more likely to engage in alcohol and substance abuse not long after, often because of greater functional impairment, or to experience depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. That emotional damage can linger. A study of young adults who lost siblings to cancer found that most still had not worked through their grief, even nine years later. A case control study of children in Scandinavia found that children who experience the death of a parent had twice the chance of committing suicide. That increased risk lasted at least 25 years. The risk of suicide in children who had lost a parent was 4 in 1,000 for boys and 2 in 1,000 for girls. Emotional damage can have a physical impact as well. In 2013, researchers published work in PLoS One that showed that both men and women who had lost a sibling in adulthood had an elevated risk of death from stroke, potentially stress related, in the 18 months after the sibling’s death. For women, that increased risk got worse over time, still increasing 18 years later. Sibling death from external causes (mostly accidents and suicides) was also associated with an increased risk of death from heart attacks in women years later. Families who lose a child are more likely to show problems that already existed, like evidence of social deprivation and poor health. Health care professionals may want to consider that the death of a child can exacerbate problems, and signify long-term social, behavioral and environmental risks for the survivors. These warning signs exist in other familial relationships. Research has shown that losing a child increases the mortality rate in mothers more than a decade later, both from natural and unnatural causes. It increases the mortality rate in fathers, too, but only from unnatural causes. Losing a parent does the same. But death may be harder for children. As a parent, I can imagine nothing worse than the loss of a child. But as I watch my children grow up together, I’m struck by the fact that their bond is, at times, stronger than their bonds to my wife and me. They’re together at school. They’re together at camp. They’re together when they play. They have secrets and shared experiences as they grow and develop together. They also have known almost no life without each other. They are also far less capable of handling a loss than I or my wife would be. A study in the late 1990s examined how children responded to the loss of a parent versus a sibling. Girls, in general, were more affected by the loss of a sibling — especially a sister. Preteens showed higher levels of depression and anxiety, and adolescents had more attention problems and anger. Given all these data, it may be time for us to pay more attention to the long-term effects of a child’s death. We can take hope from research showing that most children do thrive and overcome adversity, even after such a loss. Too many do not, though. We ought to monitor those who lost siblings as children for possible health consequences for many years to come. Continue reading the main storyHealth via NYT > Health http://ift.tt/2koaaw3 July 31, 2017 at 07:12AM
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