Parental death from suicide is known to be linked with mental health problems and increased risk of suicide in the bereaved child, but little is known about the long-term risks of suicide after parental death from other causes.
In Western societies, 3-4% of children experience the death of a parent, established as one of the most stressful and potentially harmful life events in childhood. While most children and adolescents adapt to the loss, others develop preventable social and psychological problems.
In order to gain a better understanding, and with a view to improving suicide prevention efforts, Mai-Britt Guldin, PhD, of Aarhus University, Denmark, and colleagues tracked data for children from three Scandinavian countries for up to 40 years.
They hypothesized that accidental and suicidal death of a parent plus shared genes increase the suicide risk for offspring.
The researchers wanted to look at how risk trajectories may differ by cause of parental death, age of child at time of parental death, sex, time since bereavement, birth order, socioeconomic status and parental psychiatric history.
They used nationwide register data from 1968-2008 in Denmark, Sweden and Finland for a total of 7.3 million individuals, identifying 189,094 children (2.6%) who had a parent die before the child turned 18. These were compared with a control group of people whose parents had not died.
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