BACKGROUND Enabling patients to die in their preferred place is important but achieving preferred place of death may increase the informal carer's risk into bereavement. AIM To determine risk factors of family carers bereaved through cancer in Northern Ireland. DESIGN These results form part of a larger QUALYCARE-NI study which used postal questionnaires to capture quantitative data on care...

The management and delivery of bereavement support services in palliative care settings present practical and ethical challenges. A national survey, conducted in 2007, examined bereavement practice in ten Marie Curie hospices across the UK. This qualitative study was undertaken using semi-structured telephone interviews with Bereavement Service Leaders located in each hospice. Although findings...

BACKGROUND To examine the effect of time on suicide after bereavement among widowed persons. METHOD The data were extracted from Swiss mortality statistics for the period 1987-2005. The time between bereavement and subsequent death, specifically by suicide, was determined by linkage of individual records of married persons. The suicide rates and the standardized mortality ratios in the first ...

BACKGROUND Since the seminal publications of Shneidman (1969) and Cain (1972), suicide bereavement and postvention have attracted increasing research interest. AIMS To examine the topics of suicide bereavement and postvention in the core international suicidology journals, since their inception until mid-2013, in order to reveal the number of postvention articles throughout the years, their g...

OBJECTIVES US and UK suicide prevention strategies suggest that bereavement by the suicide of a relative or friend is a risk factor for suicide. However, evidence is lacking that the risk exceeds that of any sudden bereavement, is specific to suicide, or applies to peer suicide. We conducted the first controlled UK-wide study to test the hypothesis that young adults bereaved by suicide have an ...

BACKGROUND The etiology of type-2 diabetes is only partly known, and a possible role of prenatal stress in programming offspring for insulin resistance has been suggested by animal models. Previously, we found an association between prenatal stress and type-1 diabetes. Here we examine the association between prenatal exposure to maternal bereavement during preconception and pregnancy and develo...

CONTEXT Increasing numbers of people will die from chronic disease. Families contribute significantly to end-of-life care, but their role may not be recognized. OBJECTIVES To 1) establish the proportion of older cohabitees identified in primary care as "carers"; 2) describe demographic and lifestyle characteristics of cohabitees of people terminally ill with cancer, dementia, and chronic obst...

BACKGROUND Family caregiving in the context of advanced disease in particular, can be physically and emotionally taxing. Caregivers can subsequently face bereavement exhausted with few supports, limited resources and a significant proportion will develop negative psychological and social outcomes. Although some research has attended to the bereavement experiences of family caregivers who had ca...

CONTEXT The DSM-IV criteria for major depressive episodes exclude brief episodes that are better accounted for by bereavement. However, a proposal has been made to remove this exclusion from the DSM-5. OBJECTIVES To compare the demographic and psychiatric characteristics of participants with bereavement-related, single, brief (<2 months) depressive episodes and other types of depressive episo...

IMPORTANCE The period immediately after bereavement has been reported as a time of increased risk of cardiovascular events. However, this risk has not been well quantified, and few large population studies have examined partner bereavement. OBJECTIVE To compare the rate of cardiovascular events between older individuals whose partner dies with those of a matched control group of individuals who...