LONDON -- Growing up in a single-parent family can damage the health of a child regardless of factors such as socioeconomic status, Swedish researchers are claiming.

Particular consequences of being a child from a single-parent household are an increased risk of mental illness and suicide, say the authors of a study published in the Lancet.

Dr. Gunilla Ringb?ck Weitoft of the Stockholm-based National Board of Health and Welfare and colleagues looked at 65,000 children living with single parents in the 1990s and compared them with 920,000 brought up in two-parent households.

The children living with only one parent were twice as likely to have psychiatric disease compared with their peers from the control group, even after taking into account parents' own mental health and substance abuse problems and the family's social and economic background.

In addition, the risks of the children having alcohol-related disease or attempting suicide were also doubled.

Narcotic abuse during childhood was increased threefold among girls and fourfold among boys from single-parent households, says the research team. Dr. Weitoft says, "Growing up in a single-parent family is associated with increased risks of a variety of severe health outcomes."

One of the particular causes of health problems, she says, is a lack of household resources among children in single-parent homes. "Even when a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic circumstances are included in multivariate models, children of lone parents still have increased risks of mortality, severe morbidity and injury," she concludes. (AFP)