Detecting emotional and behavioural problems in paediatric clinics

Abstract

There is an increased prevalence of emotional and behavioural disturbance in children attending paediatric out-patient clinics. The SDQ could be added to routine paediatric assessments to aid appropriate referral of children with a possible psychiatric disorder to child mental health services.

Mental health problems in children and adolescents referred to a national epilepsy center

“…The Norwegian study of adolescents with epilepsy [4] as a subsample in a large epidemiological study [22] found higher self-reported SDQ scores than in adolescents without epilepsy. As rated by parents, peer problems were prevalent in our sample and were in the abnormal range for 65.6% of girls and 62.5% of boys, compared with 10.1% and 13.4% of girls and boys in the British community sample [23], and 18.0% and 21.2% in a pediatric outpatient sample [26], respectively. The study by Davies et al [3] of a British representative sample with epilepsy compared the subgroup with 'uncomplicated' epilepsy (42 out of 67 patients) to those with 'complicated' epilepsy (25 out of 67).…”

“…Norwegian normative data for parent SDQ for this age group have not yet been published. As extensive research has been performed in Great Britain based on the SDQs, we have compared our results with results from the 1999 British Child and Adolescent Mental Health survey [18,19,23], as well as to an epilepsy subsample from that survey [3], and a UK pediatric outpatient sample [26].…”

“…Definite or severe difficulties were reported by parents, teachers, and self-reports of 80.0%, 58.8%, and 35.0% for girls, respectively, and 67.5%, 70.6%, and 24.1% for boys, respectively. Table 3 shows parental SDQ data from our sample compared with parental data from a British pediatric outpatient clinic sample and a British community sample reported by Glazebrook et al [26]. Fifty-six percent of girls and 45% of boys had scores in the abnormal range for total problems, compared with 19% and 21% of girls and boys in the pediatric outpatient sample and 8% and 12% in the community sample, respectively.…”

“…The British cutoffs are defined as the scores closest to the 80 th (for the borderline score) and 90 th percentile (for the abnormal score) [18]. To contrast our tertiary epilepsy center sample, we compared parental data from our sample with parental SDQ data from a British pediatric outpatient clinic sample [26].…”

Psychosocial support for children and families requiring renal replacement therapy

“…We are increasingly aware that emotional and behavioural problems occur in children with chronic illness and up to 20 % of children attending a variety of paediatric outpatient clinics had a probable psychiatric disorder [21,22]. Thirty per cent of 44 patients aged 9-18 years with CKD met the criteria for depression, which was more frequent in those with longstanding disease [23].…”