The impact of childhood conditions and concurrent morbidities on child health and well-being

The impact of childhood conditions and concurrent morbidities on child health and well-being

Waters, E., Davis, E., Nicolas, C. and Lo, S.K. 2008, The impact of childhood conditions and concurrent morbidities on child health and well-being, Child : care, health and development, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 418-429.

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Title	The impact of childhood conditions and concurrent morbidities on child health and well-being
Author(s)	Waters, E. Davis, E. Nicolas, C. Lo, S.K.
Journal name	Child : care, health and development
Volume number	34
Issue number	4
Start page	418
End page	429
Publisher	Wiley-Blackwell
Place of publication	Oxford, England
Publication date	2008-06-05
ISSN	0305-1862 1478-1972 1365-2214
Keyword(s)	children and adolescents health conditions multiple morbidities quality of life
Summary	Background. Understanding the impact of illnesses and morbidities experienced by children and adolescents is essential to clinical and population health programme decision making and intervention research. This study sought to: (1) examine the population prevalence of physical and mental health conditions for children and quantify their impact on multiple dimensions of children's health and well-being; and (2) examine the cumulative effect of concurrent conditions. Methods. We conducted a cross-sectional school-based epidemiological study of 5414 children and adolescents aged 5–18 years, and examined parental reports of child health and well-being using the parent-report Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ) PF50 13 scales are scored on a 0–100 pt scale with clinically meaningful differences of five points and the presence of childhood conditions (illnesses and health problems). Results. Asthma, dental, vision and allergies are the most commonly identified health problems for children and adolescents, followed by attention- and behaviour-related problems (asthma 17.9–23.2%, dental 11.9–22.7%, vision 7.2–14.7%, chronic allergies 8.8–13.9%, attention problems 5.1–13.8% and behaviour problems 5.7–12.0%). As the number of concurrent health problems increase, overall health and well-being decreases substantively with mean differences in CHQ scale scores of 14 points (−7.69 to −21.51) for physical health conditions, and 28 points (−5.15 to −33.81) for mental health conditions. Conclusions. Children's health and well-being decreases linearly with increasing presence and frequency of health problems. Having three or more conditions concurrently significantly burdens children's health and well-being, particularly for family-related CHQ domains, with a greater burden experienced for mental health conditions than physical health conditions.
Language	eng
Field of Research	111403 Paediatrics
Socio Economic Objective	920299 Health and Support Services not elsewhere classified
HERDC Research category	C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal
HERDC collection year	2008
Copyright notice	©2008, Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Persistent URL	http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30017969

Document type:	Journal Article
Collection:	School of Health and Social Development

Citation counts:	Cited 8 times in TR Web of Science Cited 10 times in Scopus
Access Statistics:	331 Abstract Views, 1 File Downloads - Detailed Statistics
Created:	Fri, 14 Aug 2009, 13:59:13 EST

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