Esme Fuller-Thomson

Were they smokers?

And then we included the factor of whether their parents had divorced before they were 18.

Now, I do need to comment that parental divorce used to be very rare.

So the youngest person in this study was born in 1957.

So if they went through divorce, it was rare to go through divorce.

There was a lot more stigma around divorce than in later generations where it was more common.

So we certainly don't know if this association will exist forever.

for like generation X or Gen Y or Gen Z, where it's a much more common occurrence.

Well, there's a stress pathway that's called the HPA axis, and that's about how your brain reacts to stress.

And so there's research on this biological embedding.

It's often around children who've grown up in poverty.

And how do they respond?

How do they respond hormonally to stress?

And how does their body actually react to future stressful experiences?

So it's not just the stress of being a survivor, or not a survivor, but going through a parent's divorce.

It's also how it has a cascade of potentially negative overreaction through the rest of your life course when you are experiencing stresses.

Well, there's been substantial research looking at children, and there's a higher risk of depression, of anxiety disorders, of suicide.

The mental health pieces have been fairly well studied, and those can have a long shadow that follows you through life.

But there hasn't been as much attention to physical health risks.

And this is, in fact, the second study we did.