Unfortunately, the bad news for children of divorce continues to pile up. This time a new study showing that children whose parents divorce are more than twice (2.2 times) as likely to suffer a stroke at some point during their lives as children who grew up in intact homes.
The study was done by researchers at University of Toronto and was based on 13,000 people living in Canada who had taken part in the 2005 Canadian Health Survey. The association between stroke and being a child of divorce remained even when accounting for traditional stroke risk factors, such as smoking, obesity and diabetes.
The researchers point out that many of the children of divorce who suffered a stroke were born in 1940 or earlier and that the negative stigma of divorce back then might be a contributing factor to the increased risk of stroke. Also, childhood income was not part of the current data; so more research needs to be done to identify if poverty could be a contributing factor.
Lead researcher, Esme Fuller-Thomson, was quick to point out that her study showed an association between divorce and stroke, not that divorce causes strokes, and findings would be need to be replicated in other studies before more solid conclusions could be drawn.