Esme Fuller-Thomson: Parental Divorce And Strokes - December 19, 2025

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The Last Show with David Cooper 10 min 3 speakers 7 chapters transcribed

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How does parental divorce influence health decades later?

David Cooper 0:02

Exploring both interstellar and interpersonal space-time continuums. The Last Show with David Cooper.

David Cooper 0:18

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.

Esme Fuller-Thomson 0:45

Thank you for having me.

David Cooper 0:46

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?

Esme Fuller-Thomson 0:57

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.

What are the hypotheses connecting stress to health outcomes?

Esme Fuller-Thomson 1:25

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.

David Cooper 2:06

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?

Esme Fuller-Thomson 2:25

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

What does the study reveal about stroke risk related to parental divorce?

Esme Fuller-Thomson 2:46

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.

David Cooper 3:43

Interesting. As the divorce rate has increased over the last, I don't know, 40, 50 years, maybe these trends will drop, maybe not.

How does stress biologically embed in individuals?

David Cooper 3:49

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?

Esme Fuller-Thomson 4:00

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.

David Cooper 4:47

Let's go over what some of those potential negative overreactions are.