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More than one-third of children experience maltreatment globally

Approximately one-third of children globally may be affected by childhood maltreatment, and these children are at double the risk for a mental disorder, according to findings from a population-based retrospective cohort study conducted in the United Kingdom and published in Lancet Psychiatry.

“Since childhood maltreatment is thought to affect one in three children, our study, along with evidence from other global studies, demonstrates the substantial burden of mental ill health following child maltreatment,” Joht S. Chandan, MFPH, from the Institute of Applied Health Research at the University of Birmingham, U.K., and colleagues wrote. “The findings illustrate how imperative it is that public health approaches, including those aimed at preventing and detecting childhood maltreatment and its associated negative consequences, are urgently implemented to reduce the burden of mental ill health.”

Chandan and colleagues evaluated the association between the development of mental illness, the initiation of new prescriptions for mental illness and childhood maltreatment. They analyzed a dataset from patients included in The Health Improvement Network database, which comprises U.K. electronic medical records from general practices throughout the U.K., according to the researchers. They then identified patients exposed to childhood maltreatment using read codes, as well as unexposed patients who had no associated codes, and matched these patient groups by age and sex.

Chandan and colleagues analyzed data entered between 1995 and 2018 and identified 217,758 patients with any recorded childhood maltreatment. They matched these patients to 423,410 unexposed controls.

For the exposed group, the researchers reported 11,665 (5.9%) new diagnoses of mental illness during the study period, compared with 15,301 (3.7%) for the unexposed cohort, giving an adjusted incidence rate ratio (IRR) of 2.14 (95% CI, 2.08-2.19). A total of 30,911 (14.8%) patients in the exposed group received a new prescription for any type of mental illness compared with 36,390 (8.9%) of patients in the unexposed group, giving an adjusted IRR of 2.44 (95% CI, 2.4-2.48).

“Our findings are of note in a U.K. setting as well as other global nations, where there is a professional and moral obligation to report suspected child mistreatment,” the researchers wrote.

They noted that the results from this study “support findings from meta-analyses that incorporated cohorts that were largely derived from north America.” – by Joe Gramigna

Disclosures: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.