Parental Chronic Illness, Internalizing Problems in Young Adulthood and the Mediating Role of Adolescent Attachment to Parents: A Prospective Cohort Study

Adolescents' challenging and grief-filled transitions when living with a parent with ALS: A qualitative interpretive study

OBJECTIVE

The study aimed to explore the meaning for adolescents of living with a parent with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

METHODS

The design is qualitative. Interviews were conducted between December 2020 and April 2022 with 11 adolescents (8-25 y), living in households with a parent with ALS in Sweden. The analysis was phenomenologically hermeneutical.

RESULTS

The adolescents were in a difficult and exposed situation, especially if the parent had a severe disability and assistant care providers were in the home. Witnessing the gradual loss of the parent in an indefinite battle against time, while still needing them, elicited grief-filled and hard-to-manage emotions. Everyday life was turned upside down, resulting in greater responsibility for the adolescents, not only in helping with household chores and assisting the ill parent, but also in emotionally protecting both parents. It forced the adolescents to mature faster and put their own life on hold, triggering experiences of being limited. This, together with changing family roles yet being more attached to home, reinforced the imbalance in the adolescents' lives. The interpreted whole of the adolescents' narratives revealed that living with a parent with ALS meant a challenging and grieving transition during an already transition-filled adolescence, which left the adolescents struggling to keep a foothold on a life torn apart.

CONCLUSION

The unbalanced life situation may hinder the adolescents' identity formation and emancipation, which are developmentally important for managing a healthy and independent adulthood. The results emphasize the importance of early targeted support to reach this vulnerable group in order to secure their health.

The association between parental chronic physical illness and adolescent functional somatic symptoms

BACKGROUND

Previous studies have found that adolescents with a chronically ill parent may experience more internalizing problems. It is less clear if this association is sex-related, and whether it is specific for functional somatic symptoms (FSSs) or concerns other internalizing or externalizing problems.

METHODS

In a prospective cohort of adolescents, oversampled on emotional and behavioral problems (n = 841; mean age 14.9 years), we examined the association between parental chronic illness and adolescent's FSSs, and internalizing and externalizing problems. Adolescent's internalizing and externalizing symptoms were measured using the Youth Self Report; parental chronic physical illness was reported during an interview. Associations were tested using linear regression analyses taking into account socio-demographic confounders. We also explored gender-interaction effects.

RESULTS

Having a chronically ill parent (n = 120; 14.3 %) was associated with more FSS in girls (B = 1.05, 95%CI = [0.23, 1.88], p = .013), but not in boys (sex-interaction: p = .013). In girls, an association was also found between parental chronic illness and more internalizing problems (B = 2.68, 95%CI = [0.41, 4.95], p = .021), but this association disappeared when FSSs were excluded from the Internalizing problem scores.

LIMITATIONS

The current study has a cross-sectional design and relied on self-reported parental chronic physical illness what may have induced misclassification.

CONCLUSION

Findings suggest that having a chronically ill parent is associated with more FSSs in adolescent girls and that this association is specific for FSSs instead of general internalizing problems. Girls with a chronically ill parent may profit from interventions to prevent the development of FSSs.

Early life factors associated with the experiences of pain in later life: evidence from a population based study in India

BACKGROUND

The influence of early life factors is becoming increasingly apparent as studies investigate how experiences, resources, and constraints in childhood affect health and well-being later in life. The present study contributes to this literature by examining the association between several early life factors and self-reported pain among older adults in India.

METHODS

Data come from the 2017-18 wave 1 of the Longitudinal Ageing Study of India (LASI). The sample size includes 28,050 older adults aged 60 and above (13,509 men and 14,541 women). Pain is a self-reported, dichotomous measure where participants responded to whether they were often troubled with pain and whether this experience interfered with their ability to carry out daily household chores. Early life factors, which are retrospective accounts of experiences, included the respondent's position in birth order, their health status, school absenteeism, being bedridden, family socioeconomic status (SES), and their parent's experience with chronic disease. Logistic regression analysis is employed to examine the unadjusted and adjusted average marginal effects (AME) of selected domains of early life factors associated with the probability of experiencing pain.

RESULTS

22.8% of men and 32.3% of women reported pain that interfered with daily activities. Pain was higher among men (AME: 0.01, confidence interval (CI): 0.01-0.03) and women (AME: 0.02, CI: 0.01-0.04) with third or fourth birth order compared to counterparts with first birth order. Both men (AME: -0.02, CI: -0.04-0.01) and women (AME: -0.07, CI: -0.09 - -0.04) having a fair childhood health status reported a lower probability of pain. The probability of pain was higher among both men (AME: 0.03, CI: 0.01-0.07) and women (AME: 0.07, CI: 0.03-0.13) who were bedridden due to sickness in their childhood. Similarly, the pain likelihood was higher among men who missed school for more than a month due to health problems (AME: 0.04, CI: -0.01-0.09). Men and women with poor financial condition in their childhood reported (AME: 0.04, CI: 0.01-0.07) a higher probability of experiencing pain relative to their peers who reported a more financially advantaged early life.

CONCLUSIONS

Findings of the present study add to the empirical literature on the association between early life factors and later life health and well-being. They also are pertinent to health care providers and practitioners working in pain management, as this knowledge better positions them to identify older adults most susceptible to pain. Moreover, findings of our study underscore that the interventions to ensure health and well-being in later life must start far earlier in the life course.

The Influence of Parent's Cardiovascular Morbidity on Child Mental Health: Results from the National Health Interview Survey

BACKGROUND

This study assessed the association between cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of death in the United States, among parents and child mental health.

METHODS

Our sample included 9076 children aged 6 to 17 years. Data were pooled from the 2016-2018 waves of the National Health Interview Survey. We fitted a logistic regression to obtain the odds ratios in favor of child mental health problems for parental CVD. We also fitted a multinomial logistic regression to obtain the odds in favor of the severity of mental health problems (i.e., minor, definite, and severe).

RESULTS

The adjusted odds of facing difficulties for a child of a parent with CVD were 1.64 (95% CI: 1.28-2.11) times that of their peers whose parents did not have CVD. The adjusted relative risk of facing minor and definite difficulties for a child of a parent with CVD were 1.48 (95% CI: 1.13-1.94) and 2.25 (95% CI: 1.47-3.46) times that of their peers of parents without CVD.

CONCLUSIONS

The results suggest a strong association between child mental health and parental cardiovascular morbidity, demonstrating the need for the development or adaptation of existing public health interventions to facilitate mental health support for children of parents with CVD.

A study of emotional intelligence in an Egyptian sample of offspring of patients with schizophrenia

Background

Emotional intelligence is usually a construct measured in healthy children, now it may be used for relatives of schizophrenia, and considered as trait marker for schizophrenia. Offspring of parents with schizophrenia are considered children with high familial risk for major mental disorder. The aim of the study is to assess emotional intelligence in a group of off springs of a parent with schizophrenia and compare them to healthy control subjects, and to find possible relation between emotional intelligence in offspring and profile of symptoms in schizophrenic parents.

Results

Offspring of parents with schizophrenia had lower scores of emotional intelligences than their matched controls in emotion perception, self-esteem, low impulsivity and emotion regulation’s subsets of TEIQue-CF. There was correlation between offspring trait emotional intelligence and their parent’s duration of illness. There was no correlation found between schizophrenia severity in the parents and their offspring’s trait emotional intelligence.

Conclusions

Offspring of parents with schizophrenia had impaired trait emotional intelligence in some of its facets when compared to normal healthy subjects.