Introduction: Evidence in child abuse cases can be scarce and is often centred around the child's testimony. However, child testimony varies with the child's development. Here, an overview of suspects, case decisions and court verdicts from a cohort of children is presented, stratified across children aged 0-3, 4-7, 8-11, and 12-15 years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSuccessful prevention of physical child abuse is dependent on improvements in risk assessment. The risk of abuse is assumed to increase when family stressors overcome resources. Severe physical disease can increase stress, and parental physical disease has been studied as a risk factor for physical child abuse, but with heterogeneous definitions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvidence describing age-related differences among children with suspected physical and sexual child abuse is lacking. We describe findings in severe cases of suspected abuse. Cases with 756 children <15 years old were included during 2001-2013 at the Department of Forensic Medicine, Aarhus University, using forensic evaluation documents, medical records, and court proceedings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBr J Clin Psychol
November 2022
Objectives: Emotion regulation is a predictor of overall life outcome. Problems of emotion regulation are associated with multiple psychiatric disorders and could be a potential treatment target for improving well-being and functioning. Children at familial high risk of severe mental illness have a markedly increased risk of various psychopathology and constitute a group at significant risk of emotion regulation problems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychiatry
May 2022
Background: Children born to parents with severe mental illness are at increased risk of mental and behavioral difficulties during childhood. We aimed to investigate the occurrence of clinically significant behavioral difficulties in 7-year-old children of parents diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder as well as in control children by using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Further, we aimed to determine if the SDQ could function as a screening instrument for clinically relevant behavioral problems of children at high risk of these severe mental illnesses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Previous studies on the association of online courses and mental health were mainly conducted in universities, and no study investigated the relationship between characteristics of online courses and children's mental health in primary and secondary school. This study aimed to explore the association of online courses and children's mental health in primary and secondary school.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted through an online survey among 540 primary and secondary school students and their parents in the eastern, central and western region of China from April to May in 2020.
Objectives: The associations of long-term risks of the full spectrum of mental disorders with clinically reassuring but suboptimal score range 7-9 remain unclear. This study investigated these associations during up to 38 years of follow-up.
Methods: In a nationwide cohort study of 2,213,822 singletons born in Denmark during 1978-2015, we used cox regression to estimate the hazard ratio (HR) of mental disorders with a 95% CI.
Clin Transl Allergy
December 2021
Background: Atopic diseases are characterized by dysregulated inflammatory response, which may incur the onset of peripartum mental disorders, but the impact remains unknown. This study examined whether and to what extent the history of atopic diseases is associated with newly onset peripartum mental disorders.
Methods: Using population-based registries, we identified all primiparous women who gave birth to live singletons in Denmark during 1978-2016 (n = 937,422).
Aims/hypothesis: We aimed to investigate the associations between maternal diabetes before or during pregnancy and the risk of high refractive error (RE) in offspring until the age of 25 years.
Methods: This nationwide register-based cohort study comprised 2,470,580 individuals born in 1977-2016. The exposure was maternal diabetes during or before pregnancy (type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes and gestational diabetes).
Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand
October 2021
Introduction: Long-term growth has been poorly investigated in boys and girls born to parents receiving fertility treatment. This study aimed to investigate the growth of children born following fertility treatment up to adulthood hypothesizing comparable growth in children born to parents receiving fertility treatment or to subfertile parents conceiving spontaneously to that in children spontaneously conceived by fertile parents.
Material And Methods: In this historical long-term follow-up study the study population consisted of 4151 singletons born at term in the Aarhus Birth Cohort between 1990 and 1992.
Aim: The mental health problems of adolescents are important in relation to their future health and life course. The aim of this study was to investigate perceived stress in adolescence as a marker for later mental disorders.
Methods: The data consisted of a combination of questionnaire and register data for 11,929 adolescents.
Several studies have reported associations between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and behavioral outcomes in young children. We aimed to evaluate the associations of prenatal and postnatal exposures to acetaminophen with behavioral problems in children at age 11 years, using behavioral measures reported by parents and children. We studied 40,934 mother-child pairs from the Danish National Birth Cohort enrolled during 1996-2002.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur Child Adolesc Psychiatry
December 2021
Cognitive impairments are strongly associated with schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BP) with executive functions (EF) impairments as a likely key feature. Studies of everyday behavior rated EF in young children at familial high risk of SZ (FHR-SZ) are scarce and, to our knowledge, non-existent in young children at familial high risk of BP (FHR-BP). We aimed to compare everyday behavior-rated EF of FHR-SZ, FHR-BP, and control children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are suggested to interfere with thyroid hormone during pregnancy and influence fetal neurodevelopment. Epidemiological evidence regarding behavioral difficulties in childhood associated with prenatal PFAS exposure has been inconclusive.
Objective: We evaluated the association between prenatal PFAS exposure and behavioral difficulties at 7 and 11 years, and investigated the potential mediating role of maternal thyroid hormones.
Background: Some studies have indicated an increased risk of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and a small, sex-specific association with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among children prenatally exposed to obstetric oxytocin. Since oxytocin is widely used in the obstetric ward, these potentially deleterious effects are of concern. Thus, we aimed to examine whether obstetric oxytocin treatment for labour induction or augmentation is associated with ADHD and ASD in offspring born in a two-country design based on data from Denmark and Finland.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Question: Is a maternal history of spontaneous abortion (SA) associated with an increased risk of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in offspring?
Summary Answer: Our results suggest an association between maternal history of SA and ADHD in offspring, with the risk increasing with the number of maternal SA and highest in the firstborn children whose mothers had had recurrent SAs after adjusting for a number of potential confounders.
What Is Known Already: A history of SA has been associated with more complications in next pregnancies and adverse childbirth outcomes, which are risk factors for ADHD in the offspring. However, no previous study has investigated whether maternal SA increases risk of ADHD in the offspring.
Socioeconomic factors correlate with mental health and affect individual life chances. However, the influence of specific and cumulative social disadvantages on children's mental health problems has received little attention. Previous studies have primarily used global measures of mental health problems or aggregated indicators of socioeconomic status.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: To estimate the association between post-term delivery and risk of physical disabilities, mental disabilities, and seizures during the first 7 years of life.
Methods: Data from 57,884 singleton infants born alive in week 39-45 by mothers included in the Danish National Birth Cohort (1997 to 2004) were analyzed, of these 51,268 were born at term (39-41 + 6) and 6616 post-term (42 + 0-44 + 6). Information on clinical endpoints was obtained from an interview at 18 months of gestational age, from a 7-year questionnaire, and from the Danish National Patient Register.
J Atten Disord
July 2021
This study aimed to investigate differences in parent- and teacher-reported ADHD symptoms according to the child's country of origin. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 4,207 nonimmigrant (Danish origin) and 233 immigrant (non-Danish origin) children including ratings of phenotypical ADHD symptoms on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaires. The association between ADHD symptoms and country of origin, separately for parents and teachers, was analyzed using multiple logistic regression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExposure to prenatal stress is linked to health consequences in the offspring. The objective of this systematic review was to synthesize and critically appraise primary human studies that have examined the association between prenatal exposure to psychosocial stress, or adverse life events, stress hormones, and later risk of developing obesity. We searched Medline, Embase, ScienceDirect, WorldCat, and OpenGrey up to January 2019 to identify relevant literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExploiting nation-wide data from the Danish National Birth Cohort, we show that children's emotional and behavioral problems measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) are closely related to their performance in standardized academic tests for reading and mathematics in sixth grade. The relationship is remarkably linear across the entire distribution for both the total difficulties score and subscale scores of the SDQ; higher scores on the SDQ (more problems) are related to worse performance in academic tests. We assess the similarity across respondent type; parent (child age 7 and 11), teacher (child age 11) and self-reported scores (child age 11), and find that teacher and parent reported scores have very similar slopes in the SDQ-test score relationship, while the child reported SDQ in relation to the academic test performance has a flatter slope.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The Strengths and Difficulties Ques-tion-naire (SDQ) is a brief well-validated psychometric instrument for assessment of developmental, behavioural and emo-tional problems in children and adolescents. Versions of the questionnaire covering the 2-17-year age range are an-swered by parents and by pedagogues or teachers. Also, a self-report version can be used from the age of 11 years.
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