Study Reveals Strong Links Between Death of Child and Mortality of Mother

A latest research uncovers the strong connection between the death of a child and the mortality of the mother regardless of cause of death, gender of the child, marital status, family size, and income or education level of the mother.

This study was co-conducted by a researcher at Rochester Institute of Technology. Javier Espinosa, assistant professor in RIT's College of Liberal Arts and an expert in health and labor economics. He worked on a nine years of research after studying more than 69,000 mothers whose age was between 20-50.

According to the researcher, the impact to mother mortality is strongest in the two years immediately following the child's death. The research also suggests that mother mortality increases 133 percent after the death of a child.

"To my knowledge, this is the first study to empirically analyze this issue with a large, nationally represented U.S. data set," Espinosa says. "The evidence of a heightened mortality rate for the mother, particularly in the first two years of the child's passing, is especially relevant to public health policy and the timing of interventions that aim to improve the adverse health outcomes mothers experience after the death of a child."

Along with this an extensive research was also conducted an extensive research on spousal mortality. This study led to the conclusion that men who are grieving from a wife's death experience a 30 percent increase in mortality.

For women, there is no heightened mortality due to the death of a spouse, but a correlation exists between the timing of the wife's and husband's deaths. He predicts this is because the sample was based on the married people born between 1910 and 1930.

"When a wife dies, men are often unprepared. They have often lost their caregiver -- someone who cares for them physically and emotionally, and the loss directly impacts the husband's health," he says. "This same mechanism is likely weaker for most women when a husband dies. Therefore, the connection in mortalities for wives may be a reflection of how similar mates' lives become over time."

This research paper was based "Maternal bereavement: The heightened mortality of mothers after the death of a child," co-written by William Evans from the University of Notre Dame, were recently published in the journal Economics and Human Biology.