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Imagine a child who has been hospitalized numerous times. Perhaps they were also diagnosed with a mental health condition as a teenager. At the same time, they grew up in a family affected by unemployment, poverty or alcohol abuse.

Some children grow up with challenges affecting their physical or mental health and in families under pressure on multiple fronts. These adversities are difficult in themselves, but they may also have long-term consequences well into adulthood.

Children exposed to multiple, overlapping adversities appear to face an elevated risk of dying prematurely in adulthood compared with other children.

A new study from the University of Copenhagen shows that children who experience both health-related problems and a high degree of family adversity have more than seven times the risk of dying from age 16 into early adulthood compared with children who grow up with few or no such challenges.

The study is published in the journal The Lancet Regional Health—Europe.

"This is a striking figure in a society that prides itself on providing universal access to health care. Yet here we see a group of children who are profoundly disadvantaged and who continue to experience the consequences of health inequality many years later," says Naja Hulvej Rod, professor of epidemiology at the Copenhagen Health Complexity Center and lead author of the study.

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