The Last Show with David Cooper
Esme Fuller-Thomson: Parental Divorce And Strokes - December 19, 2025
20 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: How does parental divorce influence health decades later?
Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper. What if something that happened before you were 18 was quietly influencing your health today? That thing, your parents getting divorced. I know, I know.
But new research shows that if your parents get divorced while you're young, it could leave a biological footprint that raises health risks for you decades later. I'm here with Professor Esme Fuller-Thompson, Director of the Institute for Life Course in Aging at the University of Toronto. Who knows all about this. Esme, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
So how does something that happens in your childhood, like an event, not necessarily a physical health thing, end up influencing us and showing up in our body, what, 50, 60 years later?
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.
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Chapter 2: What are the hypotheses connecting stress to health outcomes?
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.
When you break it down that way, I believe it's understood that prolonged levels of high stress can cause health problems, the poverty thing. Also, overvigilance sounds like just another form of stress to me. It starts to make sense here. Talk to me about the study. What do you end up asking participants to make links like this to come to these conclusions?
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
Chapter 3: What does the study reveal about stroke risk related to parental divorce?
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. 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.
Interesting. As the divorce rate has increased over the last, I don't know, 40, 50 years, maybe these trends will drop, maybe not.
Chapter 4: How does stress biologically embed in individuals?
I guess we'll have to wait and see. There's something interesting here about this biological embedding of stress. Can you explain what that means and how stress, like you say, gets under your skin?
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.
Let's go over what some of those potential negative overreactions are. Some of the health outcomes you're seeing in people in their old age now or older age now. Is it a higher chance of stroke? Is there any other health risks if your parents got divorced when you were a kid?
Chapter 5: What are the mental health risks associated with parental divorce?
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.
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
Chapter 6: What interventions can help children cope with parental divorce?
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.
Armed with the data you have, I know we can't necessarily say it's going to be true of kids going through divorce now, but it may well be. The link is there in the past. It sounds like maybe an intervention or support for children going through their parents being divorced might be a good idea. Do you have any recommendations or anything you would want to say to that end?
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. Sometimes kids blame themselves, but also if there's depression, if there's anxiety, that is a stress physically and mentally. So cognitive behavioral therapy is very good for all kinds of mental health problems.
Chapter 7: How can parents mitigate the impact of divorce on their children?
It really helps you grab your negative thoughts, your negative self-talk. and makes it more functional. So I highly recommend if people are struggling to do that. Now, of course, we don't know if that'll improve your stroke risk when you hit 65, but at a minimum, we know that depression is a risk factor for later life stroke. By the way, we also know that diabetes is a risk factor.
And just to put it in perspective, the magnitude of the association, that 60% higher risk that we found associated with parental divorce, it was comparable to diabetes as a risk factor and also as depression, which are well-known, well-established risk factors.
Interesting. So parents going through it right now thinking, I want to get through this divorce and leave my kid in the best possible way and really looking out for their children. Is the recommendation perhaps cognitive behavioral therapy? Anything else you would want parents to know who are getting divorced?
So if the children are suffering, I would certainly, you know, if their mental health is not well, I would definitely do that. But I would also say, you know, dads need to be paying because poverty is a big issue. And there's a lot of people who are not paying child support. And the poverty and the social dislocation of the children are very substantial.
Well, I guess parents pay your child support is not bad advice ever. Professor Esme Fuller-Thompson is the director of the Institute for Life Course and Aging at the University of Toronto. Esme, thank you for sharing your findings with me.
Thank you for having me.
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