Jul 23, 2014 02:45 PM EDT By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

Experiencing the loss of a parent during childhood or adolescence has been linked to a greater risk of mortality in early adulthood, according to a recent study.

Researchers found that individuals who lost either a mother or a father during childhood had a greater risk of mortality in the years following the parent's death compared with people unaffected by parental death during childhood.

"Parental death in childhood was associated with a long-lasting increased mortality risk from both external causes and diseases, regardless of child's age at bereavement, sex of the child, sex of the deceased parent, cause of parental death, as well as population characteristics like socioeconomic background," study author wrote. "[These] findings warrant the need for health and social support to the bereaved children and such support may need to cover an extended time period."

For the study, researchers combined data from national registries from all children born in Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

Of these children, 189,094 (2.6 percent) lost a parent when the child was between 6 months and 18 years old. A total of 39,683 individuals died over the follow-up period, which ranged from 1 to 40 years.

Based on their findings, those exposed to parental death had a 50 percent greater risk of mortality during the study period than those unexposed to parental death. This increased risk of mortality persisted into early adulthood irrespective of child age at parental death.

A greater risk of mortality was found among children whose parent died from unnatural causes compared with natural causes (84 vs. 33 percent increase in risk of mortality, respectively), and was greatest for children who lost a parent due to suicide.

Researchers said that their findings are unlikely to be the result of a lack of material or healthcare needs. Rather, the increased mortality among the exposed children likely reflects both genetic susceptibility and the long-term impacts of parental death on health and social well-being.

The findings were recently published in PLOS Medicine.

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