Stress and well-being in mothers of young children 11 years after the Chornobyl nuclear power plant accident.

Background: This paper examines the association between exposure to the Chornobyl nuclear power plant explosion and the psychological and physical well-being of mothers with young children. The study also examines whether exposure to Chornobyl increased the vulnerability of mothers to subsequent economic and social stress, and thus represents a unique test of the stress-vulnerability model in a non-Western setting.

Method: The sample consisted of mothers evacuated from the contamination zone surrounding the plant (evacuees) and mothers who had never lived in a radiation-contaminated area (controls).

Ukrainian application of the Children's Somatization Inventory: psychometric properties and associations with internalizing symptoms.

This paper examines the psychometric properties of the Children's Somatization Inventory (CSI) in 600 10-12-year old children in Kyiv, Ukraine, replicating and extending the original findings from a sample in Nashville, Tennessee (J. Garber et al. 1991).

Comparison of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptom subtypes in Ukrainian schoolchildren.

Objective: This study used a parent-completed, DSM-IV-referenced rating scale to examine prevalence rates of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) behaviors and differences between subtypes in 10- to 12-year-old Ukrainian children.

Method: During 1997, a total of 600 parents and children residing in Kyiv, Ukraine, and their teachers participated in extensive clinical assessments using standard Western measures.

Results: The screening prevalence rate of ADHD behaviors was 19.

Children's well-being 11 years after the Chornobyl catastrophe.

Background: The psychological effects of technological disasters have rarely been studied in children. This study assessed the aftermath of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster in children evacuated to Kyiv from the contaminated zone surrounding the nuclear power facility.

Methods: In 1997, we evaluated three hundred 10- to 12-year-old children in Kyiv who were in utero or infants at the time of the disaster and who had resided near Chornobyl (evacuees) and 300 sex-matched homeroom classmates who had never lived in a radiation-contaminated area.

School and neuropsychological performance of evacuated children in Kyiv 11 years after the Chornobyl disaster.

This paper examines the cognitive and neuropsychological functioning of children who were in utero to age 15 months at the time of the Chornobyl disaster and were evacuated to Kyiv from the 30-kilometer zone surrounding the plant. Specifically, we compared 300 evacuee children at ages 10-12 with 300 non-evacuee Kyiv classmates on objective and subjective measures of attention, memory, and school performance. The evacuee children were not significantly different from their classmates on the objective measures (grades; Symbolic Relations subtest of the Detroit Test; forms 1 and 2 of the Visual Search and Attention Test; Benton Form A; Trails A; Underline the Words Test) or on most of the subjective measures (the attention subscale of the Child Behavior Checklist completed by mothers; the attention items of the Iowa Conners Teacher's Rating Scale; mother and child perceptions of school performance).