Dr. Mark Ferro, School of Public Health Sciences associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Youth Mental Health, is to receive nearly $1.3 million over five years from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
The funding will support his ongoing study, Multimorbidity in children and youth across the life-course (MY LIFE): A long-term follow-up. Earlier results of the study showed that 30 to 40 per cent of children living with a long-term physical illness, like asthma or epilepsy, also had a mental illness, like depression or anxiety, known as multimorbidity or the presence of two or more long-term health conditions.
The study found that a child's age, sex and level of disability, their caregiver's mental health and the family's income level were related to whether a child or youth would experience multimorbidity.
The follow-up part of this study, supported by the CIHR, aims to understand the long-term mental health of children and youth who are part of the MY LIFE study and who are now aged 8 to 21 years.
“Children and youth with chronic physical conditions face considerable psychosocial and emotional burden due to their health challenges,” says Ferro. “Multimorbidity has a negative impact on the quality of life of young people, and understanding their challenges is an urgent public health problem.”
Ferro and his team will look at whose mental health improves over time, remains the same and declines, and what things affect these changes. They will analyze whether new patterns of multimorbidity start as children get older, what things about their lives are related to their mental illness over time and look at how their use of mental health services changes as they get older.
Additionally, the team will study the brothers and sisters of the children and youth participating in the MY LIFE study to make comparisons to children and youth who are in the same family.
“The use of mental health-care services has greatly increased for children and youth in recent years, but knowledge as to whether multimorbidity influences service use or help-seeking behaviour is limited,” says Ferro. “The few studies that exist have reported inconsistent findings.”
Data from this study will be linked with health services data collected by the provincial government in order to gather high-quality information about service use. The study will create new knowledge needed to help support mental health in children and youth living with physical illness.
The CIHR is composed of 13 institutes, supporting researchers' discoveries and innovations that improve human health and strengthen the health-care system.