Implications of contrasting patterns of divorce in families of children with gastrointestinal disorders

A preliminary study is presented showing differential divorce rates among families with a child having Recurrent Abdominal Pain Syndrome (N = 60), Crohn's disease (N = 59), or Ulcerative Colitis (N = 54). Parents of Crohn's disease patients had a 6.8% divorce rate, which was one-third that of parents in the other two disease groups (p < .05), both of which had divorce rates about equivalent to the normative rate (20%). Marital status, age, race, religion, and socioeconomic status were ruled out as confounding variables. The 'psychosomatic' pattern of family functioning is proposed as an explanatory model for the aberrantly low divorce rate in parents of Crohn's disease patients. While the implication has been that this pattern of family functioning contributes to and/or maintains the child's disorder, a rationale is drawn for how this pattern may emerge from having a chronically ill child. An alternative and speculative model is proposed whereby a common genetic predisposition for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) may produce either Crohn's disease or Ulcerative Colitis in a genetically vulnerable child, according to the type of family configuration present.