ESCAP 2009 Congress in Budapest, Hungary: original abstract by professor Helmut Remschmidt, Philipps-University, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Marburg, Germany – Quality of Life (QOL) in Child and Adolescent Psychiatric (CAP) Patients: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Data. Chaired by B. Herpertz-Dahlmann (Germany) and T. Tamminen (Finland). Plenary Session III., 23 August 2009, 17:00 at the Budapest Congress & World Trade Center.
Objectives of the study: To study QoL in a representative sample of healthy school children. To study QoL in children and adolescents with different psychopathological disorders. To measure possible changes of QoL scores during inpatient and outpatient treatment of CAP patients.
Materials and methods: Cross-sectional studies: In the first step, an instrument for measurement of QoL in children (ILC) was developed and tested in a representative sample of 9327 school children. In the second step, QoL was measured within a multicenter study in 626 CAP patients and compared with reference data of the representative sample of school children.
Longitudinal studies: Pre-, post- and follow up-measurement of QoL was performed in 581 CAP inpatients and 727 CAP outpatients.
The tool used for the measurement of QoL was the Inventory for Quality of Life Measurement in Children (ILC) developed by Mattejat & Remschmidt (2006), children's version and parents' version. This instrument offers the possibility to differentiate between several domains of QoL regarding family, school, peers, interests, physical and mental health, and also the impact of the respective disorder. In addition, the instrument also provides a QoL total score.
Results: There were highly significant differences between CAP patients and age-matched healthy school children.
QoL measures were much more reduced in CAP inpatients as compared to CAP outpatients.
The most pronounced reduction of QoL in patients occurred within the domains school, relation to other children and physical health, all according to the patients' ratings.
The longitudinal study revealed significant improvement of most QoL scores during the course of treatment. The improvement was more pronounced in CAP inpatients as compared to CAP outpatients. However, even after 18 months, QoL scores of CAP inpatients were significantly lower as compared to age-matched healthy school children.
Keywords: Quality of life, measurement, child and adolescent psychiatric inpatients and outpatients, cross-sectional study, longitudinal study.
