Background: The measure of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) among children with mental disorders is still in early ages, even though the worldwide-pooled prevalence of psychiatric diagnoses among children and adolescents is around 13%. Several studies confirmed that these children have impaired social and school functioning and low HRQoL. Mental disorders among children often remain undiagnosed or diagnosed too late, in that case additional negative effects could be expected. The aim of the current study was to identify psychiatric disorders in children who participated in a clinical study as a "healthy" control group and measure its effects on HRQoL.
Methods: The inclusion criteria for control participated children were not having ongoing or previous psychiatric or psychological treatment. In the second step control children (n=79, age range 6-15) were divided into two subgroups according to achieved diagnostic criteria. Measures were Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview Kid and Inventory for the Assessment of the Quality of Life in Children and Adolescents. For data analyzing due to unequal sample sizes robust Welch t-test with omega squared, Spearman's rank correlation coefficients and logistic regression were applied.
Results: According to the children and parents control group with diagnoses have lower HRQoL in school, peer relationships and mental health dimensions than control group without diagnoses. Furthermore, by the children's report this difference exists in the domain of time spent alone, by the parent proxy report exist in the somatic health and general dimensions. An increasing number of diagnoses decreased HRQoL in most areas. The presence of psychiatric diagnoses by children increase 8 times more likely to have low HRQoL in the domain of school and 4 times in the domain of time spent alone.
Conclusions: These results draw attention to the relative high ratio of undiagnosed mental disorders in the control group and for the low HRQoL of these children. Screening of psychiatric disorders in schools should be crucial and the earliest recourse of treatment in the identified children. The findings of this study also underline the importance of assessing HRQoL from different perspectives.