‘Mental disorders major cause of disease in children’

As global rates of mental disorders in children have remained stable over time, the decline of infectious diseases will place mental disorders among the main causes of disease in children aged 4-15 years, a new report has said.  The report of the study was published in the open access journal Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and […]

As global rates of mental disorders in children have remained stable over time, the decline of infectious diseases will place mental disorders among the main causes of disease in children aged 4-15 years, a new report has said. 

The report of the study was published in the open access journal Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health.

The study authors, Marie-Laure Baranne and Bruno Falissard, France described the prevalence of mental disorders among children aged 5-14 years in each of the six regions of the World Health Organisation; Africa, the Americas, South-East Asia, Europe, the Easter Mediterranean, and the West Pacific Region. 

They found that even in emerging regions, the prevalence of mental disorders is high and constant over time.

In most regions, four mental disorders ranked among the 20 diseases associated with the most disability adjusted life years , DALYs: conduct disorders, anxiety disorders, major depressive disorders and austism-Asperger syndrome. Among boys, the most common mental disorders associated with DALYs were conduct disorders, autism-Asperger syndrome and anxiety disorders. 

DALYs can be thought of as lost years of healthy life due to disease or disability.

Among girls they were anxiety disorders, conduct disorders and major depressive disorder.

Marie-Laure said they found that the prevalence of mental disorders in young people remained stable between 2000 and 2015, which suggests that mental disorders are not decreasing in young people despite the global improvement of their physical health.

Marie-Laure said, their study is intended as an urgent signal of alarm to international public health institutions and policy-makers. “Given the impact of these mental disorders in the long term, organising a global policy to address this issue requires careful preparation.”

The authors caution that the calculation of DALYs relies on parameters that are only known as approximations and based on multiple sources of information containing potential errors that may introduce some uncertainty into estimates.