Smacking your children may raise their risk of developing cancer, heart disease and asthma, say scientists.
British psychologists studied 700 adults aged between 40 and 60 in Saudi Arabia, where beating is considered an acceptable aspect of parenting.
Those who suffered corporal punishment as children had higher rates of serious disease later in life.
People who had cancer were 1.7 times more likely to have been beaten than healthy individuals, according to the study published in the Journal of Behavioural Medicine.
Smacking in childhood increased the chances of heart disease 1.3 times and asthma 1.6 times.
Prof Michael Hyland, who led the study, said: “Early life stress in the form of trauma and abuse is known to create long-term changes that predispose to later disease.
“But this study shows that in a society where corporal punishment is considered normal, the use of corporal punishment is sufficiently stressful to have the same kinds of long-term impact as abuse and trauma.”
Caning at private schools was banned in England and Wales in 1999, in Scotland in 2000, and in Northern Ireland in 2003.
But Prof David Spiegelhalter, an expert in risk assessment at Cambridge University, said: “I would be very cautious about over-interpreting these results.
“For example, the controls are taken from administrators and nurses at the hospital treating the patients, and so are likely to differ in many ways from the ill people.”
Andrea Danese, clinical lecturer in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, said: “This research adds to the growing body of research linking childhood maltreatment to later disease.
"It is possible that child maltreatment may not only affect risk for mental illness but also contribute to risk for medical illness, such as asthma, cancer and cardiac disease.”
But she added: “Although suggestive of a potential link between child maltreatment and ill health in adult life, more, carefully design research is needed to understand this link, which has potentially major public health relevance.”