The death of a loved one in childhood 'affects adult mental health'

Grief is a natural response to loss. It’s the emotional suffering you feel when something or someone you love is taken away. You may associate grief with the death of a loved one – and this type of loss does often cause the most intense grief.  This article reviews a study connecting the loss of a loved one to a child's future mental health. 

A new study published in the British Medical Journal finds a small but significant increase in psychosis risk for people who suffer the loss of a family member in childhood.

Although we know that adult health can be influenced by the genes we inherit from our parents, as well as the environment and lifestyle we experience as children, some evidence has suggested that psychological stress from the mother can also affect the development of a fetus.

But previous studies examining a link between a mother's psychological stress and her offspring's mental health have not been very conclusive.

This new study wanted to test this link further by seeing if children born to mothers who went through severe bereavement before, during or after pregnancy would be more likely to show symptoms of psychosis in adulthood.

The study was a large systematic review analyzing the medical records of 946,994 people born between 1973 and 1985 in Sweden.

The researchers identified mothers who had experienced the death of their parents, offspring or father of their children in a period between 6 months before conceiving and up to 13 years after giving birth. They also took into account the cause of death when bereavements had occurred in these families.

Overall, 321,249 (33%) of the children in the study experienced a family death before the age of 13.

To read more:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/271447.php