Parental mental disorders linked to increased mortality risk in offspring

Individuals whose parents have mental disorders have an increased risk of mortality through age 51 years, as suggested in a study.

The study included 3,548,788 individuals (48.8 percent female) born in Sweden between 1973 and 2014. Of these, 635,213 male participants and 605,935 female participants were exposed to parental mental disorders. The mean age at index parental diagnosis was 15.8 years.

Researchers used data from the Patient Register for the main outcome of offspring mortality, which included deaths due to any, natural, and unnatural causes. Cox proportional hazard models were used in the analyses.

Over a median follow-up of 20.1 years, a total of 12,725 deaths among offspring exposed to parental mental disorders and 30,087 deaths among unexposed offspring were recorded. The mortality rate was higher in the exposed group, at 7.93 per 10,000 person-years, as compared with 3.55 per 10,000 person-years in the unexposed group.

Compared with unexposed offspring, offspring exposed to parental mental disorders had higher risks of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio [HR], 2.13, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 2.08–2.18) and death due to natural (HR, 1.88, 95 percent CI, 1.83–1.95) and unnatural causes (HR, 2.45, 95 percent CI, 2.37–2.54).

Associations with offspring mortality risk were observed for all major types of parental mental disorders, with the HRs ranging from 1.58 (95 percent CI, 1.40–1.79) for eating disorders to 2.22 (95 percent CI, 1.89–2.62) for intellectual disability. The associations were pronounced when both parents had mental disorders and did not differ according to the affected parents’ sex and the child’s age at parental diagnosis.

The associations persisted in the cousin comparison analyses.