Life course of children with parental multiple sclerosis.

CONCLUSION: Growing up with a parent with MS can have both beneficial and adverse influences on children late into adulthood. On the one hand, the educational achievements of MS offspring are either better or similar to those of reference children because they attained better grades and similar educational levels. Also, some of the young adults interviewed found advantages to having learned to be responsible. On the other hand, we found an ad-verse association regarding employment, disability pension, and income. Also, the young adults interviewed had experiences of caring for and of practicing restraint toward the parent with MS, the other parent, and siblings, with most participants continuing this pattern toward friends and partners. The results of caring and restraint might partly explain some of the associations found in the register-based studies. The children might continue taking care of their parents and striving to find a balance between helping others and fulfilling their own desires. This caregiver challenge might also partly explain the beneficial association between parental MS on education and the adverse association on employment. Thus, having a parent with MS might be associated with long-term socioeconomic influence on education, employment, disability pension, income, and social relations in children's life course: Parental MS influences children far into adulthood. PMID: 28869033 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Danish Medical Journal - Category: General Medicine Tags: Dan Med J Source Type: research