Children whose at least one parent suffers from will more probably be willing to use very expensive health-care services, including visits to the emergency room and to specialists.
The previous study concerning this issue has been confirmed by the latest research. However, this new study, because of its huge size, is much more trustworthy in terms of the conclusions.
Much greater research
"We had much greater research," explained Dr Marion Sills, the lead author of the research and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Centre in Denver. "This data is more trustworthy."
Dr Jane Ripperger-Suhler, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Texas A&M Health Science Centre College of Medicine, said: "To me, it makes sense for various reasons. I think that we have been associating depression in parents to lots of various sorts of problems in children for a long time, and it is great to have really large research to support that. The guiding principle is, first of all, let’s treat parents and, secondly, maybe we have to make that treatment more accessible and more comprehensive."
The findings of the research are published in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics.
As many as 47 per cent of parents may have a diagnosis of depression, which can negatively affect child’s behavioral, developmental, psychological and physiologic health. However, previous research pointing to this connection has generally been considerably smaller or suffered from other methodological restrictions.
For this research, Sills and her team monitored health-care use patterns for nearly 70 000 kids, from infants to 17-year-olds, who were registered with the Kaiser Permanente of Colorado health plan between July 1997 and December 2001. Over 33 per cent (25 000) of the children had at least one parent with a diagnosis of depression. The rest of the children served as a control group.
More frequent visits to ER
Teenagers having depressed parents had fewer well-child-care visits, however more visits to emergency rooms and specialty clinics. That is the very first report on such a connection for this age group - 13- to 17-year-olds.
Infants having depressed parents had 14 per cent more sick visits than children of healthy parents.
The authors of the research indicated that better screening and treatment of parental depression would bring about fewer emergency department visits and other costly health-care practices.
Actually, they emphasized that routine screening of mothers in the course of their children’s well-child-care visits has appeared to be effective in the past.
Nevertheless, the research didn’t pointed out specific solutions.
"This was retrospective research. We use these to help guide us about the further steps. Based on those further steps, we make recommendations," Sills said. "This lays the groundwork. If we had discovered no correlation between parental depression and health-care utilization patterns in kids, we would be less willing to perform research on an intervention. Due to the fact that we did find it, that makes (such an intervention) more signofocant."
