Word: abel
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...makes sense that death would have an impact that illness did not. "The problem with diagnoses of heart disease and that kind of thing is that it's likely that there has been worry about the health of that individual for some time," says the study's author, Kathryn Abel of the Centre for Women's Health Research at the University of Manchester. "Once somebody gets admitted with a heart attack or stroke or a serious illness, in some way there is relief because they're being managed - it might not be such an acute event, which we know death...
...severity of maternal stress matters, then one would expect the death of child to cause more injury than the death of a parent. Indeed, says Abel, her data hinted at such a response - compared with women who lost a parent, those who lost a child appeared to have a higher likelihood of giving birth to a child at risk for schizophrenia - but her sample size was too small to confirm the theory...
...early in pregnancy, "mothers transmit information to their fetus about what condition they're likely to be born into - whether they're going to be thrifty and expect to be in a relative state of starvation, for example, or whether they can expect plenty - a clear evolutionary advantage," says Abel. "But it may be that in some settings, it has an adverse consequence because it restricts the growth of the fetus, and perhaps causes abnormal development of the brain, which makes it more susceptible to diseases, such as schizophrenia...
Though the current study looked only at schizophrenia risk, Abel and her collaborators at the University of Aarhus believe that maternal stress may have a similar effect on the risk of other conditions, among them depression and other mental disorders, along with social consequences such as the risk of criminal conviction or the likelihood of marriage, "things that tend to cluster in the deprived," says Abel. "We have not shown that this is specific to schizophrenia. We've just only looked at schizophrenia...
...Abel hopes to replicate her findings in Sweden - with a bigger study population and richer data, including the socio-economic status of mothers. "Social class is one of the big, enduring predictors of risk of mental illness. The lower the social class the higher the risk. You're born with this risk," says Abel...