OBJECTIVE Psychological adversities among young children may be associated with childhood overweight and obesity. We examined if an increased level of child behavioural problems was associated with body size among a selected group of 2-6 year old children, who were all predisposed to develop overweight. METHODS Cross-sectional analyses were conducted using baseline data from the "Healthy Star...

BACKGROUND Population level data regarding the general mental health status, and the socio-demographic factors associated with the mental health status of adolescents in Australia aged 12-16 years is limited. This study assessed prevalence of mental health problems in a regional population of Australian students in Grades 7-10, and investigated associations between mental health problems and so...

OBJECTIVE To study the applicability of the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ 2,4-p) as a screening tool for mental health problems in preschoolers, in the context of Primary Health Care; to evaluate the mental health problems of the sample, comparing data from SDQ (2,4-p) and from the Child Behavior Check List (CBCL 1½-5 years). METHODS Cross-sectional observational study with a c...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the responsiveness of the Shoulder Disability Questionnaire (SDQ). METHODS The study was conducted within the framework of an observational study on shoulder disorders in primary care. After first presentation of their complaints to the general practitioner and after one and six months, participants completed the SDQ, a single question on functional status (FSQ), and an ...

Objective: To provide the first explicit evaluation of the dimensionality of the total difficulties score of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), a widely used measure of child mental health. We do so by validating the SDQ across its full range against the prevalence of clinical disorder. Method: We use two large (N=18,415), nationally-representative surveys of children and adole...

BACKGROUND Discrepancies between multiple informants often create considerable uncertainties in delivering services to youth. The present study assessed the ability of the parent and youth scales of the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) to predict mental health problems/disorders across several mental health domains as validated against two contrasting indices of validity for psycho...

BACKGROUND For adult physical and mental health, the population mean predicts the proportion of individuals with 'high' scores. This has not previously been investigated for child mental health. It is also unclear how far symptom scores on brief questionnaires provide an unbiased method of comparing children with different individual, family or social characteristics. METHODS Subjects were 18...

The objectives of this study were to ascertain behavioral outcomes 10-11 years after 9/11 in adolescents ages 11-18 years (0-8 years old at the time of 9/11) enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Registry (Registry), and relate these outcomes to their 9/11-exposures and to parent health. Behavioral difficulties among adolescents were assessed using the adolescent-reported Strengths and Diff...

A 36-item Short Diet Questionnaire (SDQ) was developed to assess usual consumption frequencies of foods providing fats, fibre, calcium, vitamin D, in addition to fruits and vegetables. It was pretested among 30 community-dwelling participants from the Québec Longitudinal Study on Nutrition and Successful Aging, "NuAge" (n = 1793, 52.4% women), recruited in three age groups (70 ± 2 years; 75 ± 2...

BACKGROUND Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms are dimensionally distributed in the population. This study aimed to assess the role of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) and of the dopamine transporter (DAT1) genes on ADHD symptoms in the general population. METHODS We investigated 4101 individuals from the 1993 Pelotas Birth Cohort Study using the parent version of ...