Esme Fuller-Thomson

We did a study way back with 2010 data

and also found this risk.

But the people who we were studying in 2010, we looked at people at all different age ranges from 18 and up, but stroke is pretty rare in younger people.

So we thought it was time to do another study.

We were surprised nobody else had thought to look into this.

I mean, stroke is one of the leading causes of death, and this is a novel and

unexpected finding that parental divorce is associated with stroke.

But we found almost the same findings using this data 12 years later than we did at the beginning.

So there really seems to be a consistent relationship.

Again, we don't know exactly what the relationship is.

We took into account whether

people smoked and used alcohol excessively because we know that parental divorce can lead to unhealthy habits like smoking.

And of course, those are highly predictive of stroke.

We took that into account and we still found 60% higher risk of stroke for those who have had a parent divorce.

So it's not solely explained by health behaviors.

Well, parental divorce is a very stressful situation for children.

So at a minimum, we should be helping intervene with respect to the immediate mental health issues.

One particularly effective and relatively short, relatively inexpensive intervention is called cognitive behavioral therapy.

It's

children and also adults who haven't had therapy about it to sort of not internalize the reason their parents divorced.