Stability and Change of Psychopathology Symptoms Throughout Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

Assessing stability and change of children’s psychopathology symptoms can help elucidate whether specific behaviors are transient developmental variations or indicate persistent psychopathology. This study included 6930 children across early childhood (T1), late childhood (T2) and early adolescence (T3), from the general population. Latent profile analysis identified psychopathology subgroups and latent transition analysis quantified the probability that children remained within, or transitioned across psychopathology subgroups. We identified four psychopathology subgroups; no problems (T1: 85.9%, T2: 79.0%, T3: 78.0%), internalizing (T1: 5.1%, T2: 9.2%, T3: 9.0%), externalizing (T1: 7.3%, T2: 8.3%, T3: 10.2%) and the dysregulation profile (DP) (T1: 1.7%, T2: 3.5%, T3: 2.8%). From T1 to T2, 44.7% of the children remained in the DP. Between T2 and T3, 33.6% remained in the DP; however, 91.4% were classified in one of the psychopathology subgroups. Our findings suggest that for many children, internalizing or externalizing symptoms encompass a transient phase within development. Contrary, the DP resembles a severe at-risk state in which the predictive value for being in one of the psychopathology subgroups increases over time.

Sleep and mental health in childhood: a multi-method study in the general pediatric population

“…Second, actigraphic sleep measures were obtained approximately 1 year after assessment of mental health. Even though there is considerable continuity of mental health problems between late childhood and early adolescence [ 46 ], the effect may have attenuated due to the time interval between measurements. Third, it is possible that there truly is no relationship between objective sleep measures and most domains of mental health problems in a population-based setting, but that children and adolescents with more psychopathology are simply more likely to report sleep problems.…”

Cognitive performance in children and adolescents with psychopathology traits: A cross-sectional multicohort study in the general population

“…In addition to these three broad constructs, latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to derive distinct behavioral subgroups from the T-scores of the eight syndrome scales, as has been described previously for the Generation R sample (Blok et al, 2021). Subgroups derived based on LPA were preferred over creating categorical subgroups based on subclinical cutoffs as (1) LPA can better capture the complexity and diversity in symptoms, and (2) using LPA mutually exclusive subgroups that allow for a head-to-head comparison are created.…”

“…Children with DP symptoms are of particular interest. From a clinical perspective, those children with DP symptoms have been shown to be at increased risk for continued psychopathology (Althoff et al, 2010;Blok et al, 2021;Meyer et al, 2009). In addition, cognitive performance has been shown to be considerably lower compared to children without DP symptoms (Basten et al, 2014).…”

“…Thus, this continuous approach could mask specificity of individual domains of psychopathology in their relationship with cognitive performance. We have earlier identified more homogeneous behavioral subgroups in our sample using a data-driven approach (Blok et al, 2021). These homogeneous behavioral subgroups included adolescents without symptoms of psychopathology, and an internalizing, externalizing, and DP subgroups.…”

Comparing personalized brain-based and genetic risk scores for major depressive disorder in large population samples of adults and adolescents

“…Given that adults are likely to have more episodes and longer disease duration, the estimates may be more relevant within age group instead—for example, GS-Imaging cases with lifetime MDD, on average, have had three episodes of depression, each lasting for approximately 20 weeks (Supplementary Figure S5). In line with the above, adolescents may not yet demonstrate the same degree of detectable brain structural changes associated with depressive symptoms as adults, as psychopathology in adolescents can be transient and diagnostically uncertain [ 47 , 48 ]. They might also have had lesser exposure to environmental/biological stressors of MDD, thereby cumulating lesser detrimental changes to the brain which are harder to detect.…”