BMJ Group blogs: ADC Precis » Blog Archive » Mental health and long term illness

Mental health and long term illness

28 Mar, 08 | by Ian Wacogne

In Vietnamese series of 975 children, those with long term physical illnesses had a 2.1 fold increased risk of mental health problems. Here.

Posted in Mental Health.

Email This Post

Respond

Print page

There’s follow-up work with children who have had cancer in childhood, showing (overall) neutral effects on their later mental health. Why this should be isn’t really clear … but some seem to have better-than-average mental health (’growth through adversity’), the majority are where you’d expect (’resilient’) and a clump have significant residual problems (’traumatised’).

I wonder, but don’t know, if the overall neutral effect is because of a high level of support offered to families and children in the situation … and if the outcome for children with other chronic/life-threatening illnesses (e.g. serious liver disorders) is the same?

bphillips

April 1st, 2008 at 11:10 am
When I blogged this one I didn’t think of it as particularly exciting, except that it reproduced, in a resource-poor country, some of what we know about children with chronic illness in the UK. I wonder if oncological illnesses are different because because they are long term illnesses which you often “get over” - not wishing to trivialise that obviously (and understanding that late effects is now a huge field), whereas something like diabetes or CF you don’t get better from.

iwacogne

April 1st, 2008 at 1:40 pm

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

A peer review journal for health professionals and researchers covering conception to adolescence. Visit site