Childhood and family influences on depression, chronic physical conditions, and their comorbidity: Findings from the Ontario Child Health Study
Section snippets
Sampling procedure
This study uses data from the initial (1983) and third (2001) waves of the Ontario Child Health Study (OCHS) – a prospective, longitudinal study of child and adolescent health in a cohort of 3294 children ages 4–16 years, living in 1869 households across Ontario, Canada (Boyle et al., 1987). The target population included all children born from January 1, 1966 through January 1, 1979, whose usual place of residence was a household in Ontario. A stratified, clustered, and random sample was
Results
Table 1 presents the sample characteristics for each set of analyses, including the percent of families and children classified by each contextual variable, along with the covariates measured in 2001. Overall, for the entire sample (N = 1475), 13.6% of the sample reported major depression in 2001 and 28.8% reporting one or more CPCs (not shown). Prevalence of the individual CPCs were: diabetes (0.3%), heart disease (0.4%), cancer, (0.5%), high blood pressure (2.2%), emphysema/chronic bronchitis
Discussion
Findings from this study provide further support for the link between risk factors experienced in childhood and depression and CPCs in adulthood. First, we found that two childhood risk factors – parental mental health and exposure to childhood physical abuse – emerged as important predictors for many of the health outcomes. Exposure to physical abuse in childhood was associated with increased risk of depression, pain only, and comorbidity of depression with pain conditions, and with depression
Ethical approval
This study was approved by the Research Ethics Board at McMaster University.
Funding
The 1983 research funding was provided by the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services. The follow up in 2001 was funded by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) awarded to Dr. Boyle. Dr. Gonzalez was supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Lawson Postdoctoral Fellowship. Neither funding agency had direct involvement in the design and conduct of the study; in collection, management, analysis, and interpretation
Contributors
Author contributions include the following: AG was responsible for conception and design, analysis and interpretation of data, and drafting the article. LD, KG and HLM were responsible for conception and design of data, and critical revision of paper for important intellectual content. MB and HHK were responsible for statistical analyses and interpretation of data, and revising the article critically for important statistical and intellectual content. All authors had full access to all of the
Conflict of interest
None of the authors have any financial or conflict of interest to declare.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to the participants, the Statistics Canada interviewers and administrators for the collection of the data.
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