Original articleChildhood Bereavement and Lower Stress Resilience in Late Adolescence
Section snippets
National registers
All residents in Sweden have a unique National Registration Number, recorded at birth or immigration, which enables record linkages in national registers. We acquired birth date, sex, country of birth, and child-parent linkages from the Swedish Multi-Generation Register, socioeconomic information from The Education Register and the Swedish Population and Household Census, and data on birth variables from the Medical Birth Register. Date and causes of death were obtained from the Causes of Death
Results
The characteristics of the young men participating in the study are presented in Table 1. Overall, 21.6% were classified as having high stress resilience, 56.3% moderate stress resilience, and 22.1% low stress resilience. Men with low stress resilience were more likely to be underweight or obese, and perform poorer with regard to cognitive ability and physical fitness, compared with individuals with moderate or high stress resilience. A lower proportion of parents with university level
Discussion
In this large population-based study, based on prospectively collected data, we found an association between loss of a close relative in childhood and low stress resilience in late adolescence. We observed higher magnitude associations for losses occurring beyond preschool age, after loss of a father, and for losses caused by external causes (such as accidents and suicide). In contrast, no association was observed for children of women who experienced loss during pregnancy.
Overall, our results
Funding Sources
This work was supported by the Swedish Society for Medical Research (SSMF) and the Karolinska Institutet through a Research Associate Position and the Strategic Research Program in Epidemiology to F.F., and by a China Scholarship Council (No. 201206100002) to R.C. The funders have not had any role, neither in study design, in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report, nor in the decision to submit the article for publication. All authors have worked
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Conflicts of Interest: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Author Contributions: All authors together developed the study concept, participated in the design of the study, interpreted the data, critically revised the manuscript for intellectual content, and approved the final version. B.K. acquired ethical permission together with K.F., reviewed the literature, and wrote the initial draft. R.C. performed the statistical analysis. K.F. and F.F. supervised the project. B.K. and R.C. are equal contributors.
Poster Presentation: The abstract was presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting for the American Psychosomatic Society in March 2017, Sevilla, Spain.
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These authors contributed equally to this work.