Transmission of parental psychiatric conditions extends to nonpsychiatric outcomes in children

Parents with a psychiatric disorder may transmit not only such condition but also nonpsychiatric outcomes to their offspring, suggests a study.

Swedish national registers were used to link individuals born in Sweden between 1970 and 2000 to their biological parents (n=3,286,293). The authors used a matched cohort design, with stratified Cox regression and conditional logistic regression analyses, to explore the relationship between six psychiatric diagnoses in parents and 32 outcomes in their offspring.

Finally, children with and without exposure to parents with psychiatric diagnoses were followed from birth to the date of emigration from Sweden, death, or 31 December 2013, when the offspring were 14‒44 years of age.

As regards absolute risk, the majority of children who had parents with psychiatric diagnoses had not been diagnosed in specialist care. At the end of follow-up, the proportion of children having any of the 16 types of psychiatric conditions ranged from 22.17 percent for offspring exposed to parental depression to 25.05 percent for those exposed to parental drug-related disorder.

For relative risk, children exposed to any of the six parental psychiatric diagnoses had increased likelihood of the 32 outcomes, with hazard ratios ranging from 1.03 to 8.46 for time-to-event outcomes and odds ratios ranging from 1.29 to 3.36 for binary outcomes.

The authors also observed some specificities for parental diagnoses of psychosis and substance-related disorders, which showed a robust association with psychotic-like and externalizing-related outcomes, respectively, in the offspring.

“Given the broad spectrum of associations with the outcomes, service providers (eg, psychiatrists, teachers, and social workers) should consider clients’ broader psychiatric family history when predicting prognosis and planning interventions or treatment,” the authors said.