Public health Professor Dr Sunmin Lee’s research team at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, USA has focused on how various social variables can influence people’s health. As well as examining the effects of occupational stress, marital transitions, socio-economic status on cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline in elderly using cohort studies she has recently shifted her attention to the effect of childcare on older women.
This particular investigation used the data from the ongoing Nurses Health Study in the USA. They found that of the 54,000 nurses aged 46 to 71 for whom data was collected, those who were responsible for providing childcare for their healthy grandchildren for a minimum of 9 hours per week had a 55% increased risk of heart attack. (Those women caring for unhealthy grandchildren were ruled out of the study as the extra burden on them was too difficult to measure.)
The investigators could not determine the underlying factors responsible for this difference in heart attack risk and suggested that it may have been due to the increased stress, the extra demands made upon their time and physical stamina, the lack of time for self-care to exercise or eat properly, or other possible factors that may have led to the additional heart attacks. It may also have been the kind of women who volunteer to provide childcare take on too much, find they cannot say no, or are under burdens of guilt in relationship to their adult children who still need their extended parental care, or other subtle dynamics that surveys and statistics are not able to discern. Or it may just be that taking care of children is very demanding work, physically and emotionally.
Their published conclusion was that high levels of care provision to grandchildren may increase the risk of coronary heart disease among women.
Reference: November 2003, Vol 93, No. 11 | American Journal of Public Health, http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/93/11/1939 accessed 17 Feb. 10