The association between parental chronic physical illness and adolescent functional somatic symptoms 2023 Koen et al

Background
Previous studies have found that adolescents with a chronically ill parent may experience more internalizing problems. It is less clear if this association is sex-related, and whether it is specific for functional somatic symptoms (FSSs) or concerns other internalizing or externalizing problems.

Methods
In a prospective cohort of adolescents, oversampled on emotional and behavioral problems (n = 841; mean age 14.9 years), we examined the association between parental chronic illness and adolescent's FSSs, and internalizing and externalizing problems. Adolescent's internalizing and externalizing symptoms were measured using the Youth Self Report; parental chronic physical illness was reported during an interview. Associations were tested using linear regression analyses taking into account socio-demographic confounders. We also explored gender-interaction effects.

Results
Having a chronically ill parent (n = 120; 14.3 %) was associated with more FSS in girls (B = 1.05, 95%CI = [0.23, 1.88], p = .013), but not in boys (sex-interaction: p = .013). In girls, an association was also found between parental chronic illness and more internalizing problems (B = 2.68, 95%CI = [0.41, 4.95], p = .021), but this association disappeared when FSSs were excluded from the Internalizing problem scores.

Limitations
The current study has a cross-sectional design and relied on self-reported parental chronic physical illness what may have induced misclassification.

Conclusion
Findings suggest that having a chronically ill parent is associated with more FSSs in adolescent girls and that this association is specific for FSSs instead of general internalizing problems. Girls with a chronically ill parent may profit from interventions to prevent the development of FSSs.

Paywall but with section 'snippets', https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032723007681

 

It's like they've never heard of genes or environment.

We say "biological" but we mean "psychosomatic".

It is known.

Oh yes definitely - totally plausible that teenage girls, who famously do so much less work supporting the household than teenage boys, should be encouraged to be adopt illness behaviour.

There's that word "biological" again.

 

The only correlation they found was that girls with a chronically ill parent are more likely to have symptoms they classify as "functional," which are often caused by autoimmune or post-infectious disease that more women get. Thus the only thing they found is health problems run in families.

 

Illness of mother 66.7%
Illness of father 29.2%
Illness of both 4.2%

Or you could circle back to your opening two sentences and recommend we get to work on the "not medically understood" part. All of which was more succinctly posted by @RedFox.

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* I was going to write that as "too sic ill" but that was worse than the original !

 

A teenage girl in the UK is dying from bone cancer because the teenager had her back pain dismissed as mimicking her mother's back pain.

 

If you do a web search for "teenager pain dismissed" the links that get returned are almost all relating to girls and young women.

 

Really sick beyond measure of this "look what they were wearing" research where they try to find any single tiny straw they can grasp on to blame anything, anything, but what's actually happening. It's every bit as bad as the most excessively bigoted profiling on any other basis.

Good research accounts for all other things being equal. This isn't even close. This is ridiculous.

All they have to support this is "women be hysterical":

Same as Wessely's recent sadistic outing about illnesses in Iran. Those old bigoted ideas dominate psychosomatic medicine.

I completely fail to see how this is different than most racist arguments about this or that ethnic group being less civilized or intelligent, based entirely on comparing to their own society as it is right now and as far as they can see. It's pure bigotry, it's all they have.