• Posted January 23, 2025

Higher Stroke Risk Among Children of Divorce

A broken home seems to set a ticking time bomb in the brains of some children of divorce.

Seniors have a 61% higher risk of stroke if their parents divorced when they were children or teenagers, researchers reported in a study published Jan. 22 in the journal PLOS One.

The level of added risk is on par with that posed by two other well-established risk factors for stroke, diabetes and depression, researchers said.

“Even after taking into account most of the known risk factors associated with stroke -- including smoking, physical inactivity, lower income and education, diabetes, depression, and low social support -- those whose parents had divorced still had 61% higher odds of having a stroke,” lead researcher Mary Kate Schilke, a lecturer in psychology at Tyndale University in Ontario, Canada, said in a news release.

For the study, researchers analyzed data on more than 13,200 seniors 65 and older collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2022 as part of an annual survey of American health.

More than 7% of older Americans included in the study had suffered a stroke, and nearly 14% were children of divorce, researchers said.

The study specifically excluded people who’d suffered childhood abuse.

“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,” researcher Philip Baiden, an associate professor of social work at the University of Texas at Arlington, said in a news release.

Researchers found no significant added stroke risk from other forms of childhood adversity, including emotional abuse, neglect, household mental illness or substance abuse, and exposure to parental domestic violence.

It’s not clear why divorce would create an increased risk of stroke so much later in life, researchers said. They theorized that both biological and social factors could be at play.

“From a biological embedding perspective, having your parents split up during childhood could lead to sustained high levels of stress hormones,” senior author Esme Fuller-Thomson, director of the University of Toronto Institute of Life Course and Aging, said in a news release.

“Experiencing this as a child could have lasting influences on the developing brain and a child’s ability to respond to stress,” she added.

Previous research also has found that parental divorce can influence other stroke risk factors, including high blood pressure and sleep disorders, researchers added.

“We need to shed light on the mechanisms that may contribute to this association,” Fuller-Thomson said.

More information

The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies has more on helping children cope with divorce.

SOURCE: University of Toronto, news release, Jan. 22, 2025