Bullying at school can have long-term health consequences. Indeed, it promotes psychosocial risks and increases cardiovascular disorders in adulthood, according to the results of a study published in the medical journal Psychological Science. Bullies also pay the consequences in adulthood.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States followed 300 men for about thirty years. In addition to regular assessments of psychosocial, behavioral risk factors and medical data, the researchers gathered information from children, parents and teachers about their bullying attitudes when participants were between 10 and 12 years old.
As the study progressed, they supplemented their analysis with questionnaires on health factors such as levels of stress, medical history, diet, exercise and socioeconomic status, blood tests, cardiovascular evaluations, and height and weight measurements.
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Scientists observed that men who were childhood bullies were more likely to smoke cigarettes and marijuana, experience stressful circumstances, and be aggressive and hostile 20 years later. In contrast, the men who were bullied struggled more financially, felt more unfairly treated by others, and less optimistic about their future two decades later. Situations that favor cardiovascular disorders.
“The long-term effects of the involvement of bullying are important to establish,” says Karen A. Matthews, a psychology researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. “Most of the research on bullying is based on considering mental health outcomes, but we wanted to examine the potential impact of bullying on physical health and psychosocial risk factors.”
The results of this study confirm the conclusions of researchers from the Mayo Clinic in the United States who published a study in the medical journal Harvard Review of Psychiatry to warn that bullying in childhood could have negative health effects, promote chronic stress, increased risk of heart disease and of diabetes adulthood.
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