Abstract
Chronic illness can produce great stress on family life. We investigated the effect of CHD on family stability by comparing families of 40 children with surgically corrected tetralogy of Fallot with 40 families with a child who had appendectomy (APP) but never another serious illness.Matching included child's age, sex and time since surgery, and all families were free of serious illness and had intact marriage at index child's birth. Family assessment included a factual questionnaire and the multiple choice Family Effectiveness Test (FET) - completed by the mother-which discriminates well between families of disturbed and non-disturbed children and correlates well with other tests of marriage stability. No significant difference was seen in the 10 year occurrence of marriage breakup between the CHD group (7/40) and the APP group (5/40). (X2-0.40, McNemar's Test). Similarly, the mean FET scores were not significantly different between the 2 groups: CHD 38.4, APP 40.6 (t=1.41), indicating a high degree of stability (max. 48.0). Division of the CHD group into a) severe - shunt prior to total correction and b) mild - no prior shunt, revealed no differences in marriage breakup or FET between subgroups. We conclude that stress due to reparable tetralogy of Fallot in the family is well tolerated and is associated with no more family instability or marriage breakup than a childhood APP. The severity of the tetralogy has apparently no effect on the family's ability to cope.
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Finley, J., Putherbough, C., Cook, D. et al. 40 IMPACT OF CONGENITAL HEART DISEASE (CHD) ON THE FAMILY: MOST FAMILIES COPE WELL. Pediatr Res 12 (Suppl 4), 370 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-197804001-00045
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-197804001-00045