People whose parents died have greater risk of mortality, Swedish study claims

WASHINGTON: People who lost either a mother or a father during childhood have a greater risk of mortality in the years following the parent's death, according to a study published Tuesday in the U.S. journal PLOS Medicine.

The study, conducted by Jiong Li and colleagues from Aarhus University in Denmark, were based on data from national registries from all children born in Denmark from 1968 to 2008 and in Sweden from 1973 to 2006, and 89 percent of children born in Finland from 1987 to 2006.