Esme Fuller-Thomson

Thank you for having me.

Well, remember that our later life health is reflective of our whole experience across the whole life course.

So we don't actually know why this association exists, but we have some hypothesis.

For example, we think that having a parent's divorce causes stress.

And that stress kind of gets under your skin.

We also know that it tends to make children of divorced parents tend to be poorer and economically have a harder time.

And poverty in childhood impacts your health across the whole life course.

We also, it may make you kind of hypervigilant.

You sort of, you're watching out for stressful things.

So even after you've left home and life shouldn't be as stressful, you may overreact to, your body may overreact to stressful experiences.

So these are just some of our hypotheses, but we don't really know for sure exactly why this association exists.

All right.

So we were very fortunate to have a huge study with lots and lots of U.S.

respondents, age 65 and older, who were asked a whole range of questions.

The study is called the BRFSS, and we put together multiple years so that we could have this huge sample size of

13,000 older adults, and we looked at who had strokes and who did not and controlled for normal risk factors for strokes.

You know, were they eating?

Were they overweight?

Were they doing physical activity?

Things that always predict stroke.