Source: Yahoo News

Dutch researchers have completed the first study looking at the emergence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in children with a parent who has been diagnosed with a form of cancer. The study enrolled children between the ages of 11 and 18 and tracked them throughout the course of their parent's illness. They found that nearly all showed some of the symptoms associated with PTSD and these manifested as "recurring nightmares, an inability to stop thinking about the disease as well as conscious efforts to avoid hearing or knowing anything about their parent's condition." After learning of the condition, almost 29 percent of the children experienced symptoms serious enough to justify psychological help.

Other results from the study concluded that girls were more likely to experience symptoms of PTSD than boys were and, while symptoms subsided after a year for most children, some of those had their symptoms recur. Also, the PTSD-like symptoms were more likely to be felt in children whose parents had cancer as opposed to children whose parents had another chronic illness-most likely because they feared that the cancer was more likely to cause the parent's death.

Labels: cancer