Abstract
The importance of longitudinal data to help clinicians and researchers understand developmental factors associated with psychiatric disorder cannot be underestimated. The development of primary and secondary prevention strategies, enhanced understanding of continuities and discontinuities across different developmental periods, and ‘sleeper’ effects associated with controlled treatment interventions in the longer term (greater than 3 months) are pertinent areas that have been informed by longitudinal studies.
The Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) Committee on Child Psychiatry have formulated a practical summary of some longitudinal studies in key areas of child psychiatry to help their findings become better known and ‘integrated into the child psychiatry database’. Early intervention programs (chapter 2: ‘Head start or false start?’); the later-life effects of early developmental impairments, disabilities and stressors (chapter 3: ‘Effects of early disabilities and social stress on later development’); the short- and longer-term effects of chronic medical illness in childhood (chapter 4: ‘The chronically medically ill child’); and the short- and longer-term effects on children of a parent(s) with a psychiatric disorder (chapter 5: ‘Children whose parent are mentally ill’) are the initial general chapters. Childhood trauma (chapter 6), mood and anxiety disorders and suicidal behaviour in children and adolescents (chapter 7), eating disorders (chapter 8), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (chapter 9) and conduct disorder (chapter 10) form the disorder-specific summary sections of the text. A brief overview of continuities and discontinuities and the effect of comorbid conditions on behavioural and cognitive outcome of particular disorders forms the penultimate chapter (chapter 11: ‘Outcome of childhood pathology: single versus comorbid disorders’), aside from a focused conclusion to the book.
The advantages of this publication are the simplicity of its layout and the ease with which information from the various longitudinal studies cited can be extracted from the text. The primary disadvantages arise from the enviable problem of too many longitudinal studies to include all of them, and the brevity of the discussion about some of the issues raised by the data presented.
Nevertheless, this publication will be of interest to child and adolescent psychiatrists and paediatricians in clinical practice.