Exploratory assessment of parental physical disease categories as predictors of documented physical child abuse

Improved prediction of physical child abuse could aid in developing preventive measures. Parental physical disease has been tested previously as a predictor of documented physical child abuse but in broad categories and with differing results. No prior studies have tested clinically recognizable categories of parental disease in a high-powered dataset. Using Danish registries, data on children and their parents from the years 1997-2018 were used to explore several parental physical disease categories' associations with documented physical child abuse. For each disease category, survival analysis using pseudovalues was applied. When a parent of a child was diagnosed or received medication that qualified for a category, this family and five comparison families not in this disease category were included, creating separate cohorts for each category of disease. Multiple analyses used samples drawn from 2,705,770 children. Estimates were produced for 32 categories of physical diseases. Using Bonferroni-corrected confidence intervals (CIc), ischemic heart disease showed a relative risk (RR) of 1.44 (CIc 1.13-1.84); peripheral artery occlusive disease, RR 1.39 (CIc 1.01-1.90); stroke, RR 1.19 (1.01-1.41); chronic pulmonary disease, RR 1.33 (CIc 1.18-1.51); ulcer/chronic gastritis, RR 1.27 (CIc 1.08-1.49); painful condition, 1.17 (CIc 1.00-1.37); epilepsy, RR 1.24 (CIc 1.00-1.52); and unspecific somatic symptoms, RR 1.37 (CIc 1.21-1.55). Unspecific somatic symptoms were present in 71.87% of families at some point during the study period.

Most parental physical disease categories did not show statistically significant associations, but some showed predictive ability. Further research is needed to explore preventive potential.

• Few and broad categories of parental physical disease have been examined as risk factors for severe physical child abuse; no prior study has used several categories as predictors.

• Unspecific symptoms, ischemic heart disease, peripheral artery occlusive disease, stroke, chronic pulmonary disease, stomach ulcer/chronic gastritis, painful condition, and epilepsy all showed to be potential predictors, with unspecific symptoms being the most prevalent.