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A study based on Cache County residents says that children whose parents die may have a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease as they grow old.
The study from the Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services at Utah State University shows that bereaved children and adolescents have a higher risk of psychiatric disorders, including major depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome, which in turn may morph into adult disease and dementia.
What's unique about the study is the link between the 15-year Cache County Memory Study and the Utah Population Database, which allowed researchers to anchor their study to objective public birth and death records.
Combining that data with cognitive evaluations from the Cache memory study, lead researcher Maria Norton and her colleagues were able to see that experiencing particularly stressful life events — such as parental death, death of a child or spouse or caring for a spouse with dementia — is associated with significantly higher rates of Alzheimer's.
The findings are consistent with the notion that chronic exposure to high levels of glucocorticoids, which are naturally produced steroid hormones, increases the rate of nervous-system cell death.
It's not just children's suffering parental loss that causes late-life problems. Chronic stress, psychological trauma and grieving all lead to brain cell death. "It doesn't have to be from combat where someone is blown up in front of you," Norton said. "You could have a really bad marriage or lose a child to death."
The Cache County Memory Study began in 1995, when USU asked all residents of Cache County who were age 65 or older to participate; remarkably, 90 percent of that population — 5,092 individuals — agreed.
Layers of screening by specially trained nurses and technicians, with reviews by a geriatric psychiatrist and neuropsychologist, led researchers to identify 570 subjects with Alzheimer's disease. The researchers then plumbed parental death and remarriage information drawn from the Utah Population Database and genealogical records to draw their conclusions.
"It does matter what time in one's life these stressors occur," said Norton, associate professor at USU's department of family, consumer and human development.
They found that children younger than 5 years old whose parent died had twice the prevalence of Alzheimer's later in life than the study population. A mother's death during the child's adolescence more than doubled the disease prevalence unless the father remarried.
Parental death did not appear to affect prevalence of non-Alzheimer's dementia.
Some of those whose mothers died during their adolescence had a higher lifetime prevalence of major depression. But Norton also found factors associated with lower rates of depression and stress, such as high levels of religious involvement, which likely helped those individuals cope with psychological adversity and perhaps reduce their risk of Alzheimer's.
This suggests there may be preventive measures that can be taken to prevent or delay dementia. "It really does vary between individuals," Norton said, but religion "puts in a spiritual dimension."
All but 10 percent of the study subjects reported they were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, all are Caucasian and most of their parents were from farm families in the rural county. Studies of other ethnic groups or of urban populations might show different results, Norton said.
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Study: Alzheimer's disease is tied to childhood trauma
Utah State University researchers find that early loss of a parent can translate to major depression and other ailments that cause brain cell death.