Epidemiological Study for Psychiatric Disorder Among Children and Adolescents

Despite several waves of epidemiological studies in adult and elderly mental disorders in the past decades, revealing inconsistent results, little is known about the prevalence of mental disorders in the child and young adolescent population in Taiwan. However, there is an increasing trend of child and adolescent mental disorders over the past decades consistently reported across countries. With the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to the current version-5th edition (DSM-5), there has been no epidemiological study using DSM-5 in youth population in the world. The DSM-5 was published in October 2014. It warrants an epidemiological study on child and adolescent mental disorders using the DSM-5 as diagnostic criteria in Taiwan.

This is a two-stage design to conduct screening for mental disorders including autism and all neuropsychological studies in addition to questionnaires. Moreover, clinical assessment will be conducted among urban students (n = 3000) and rural students (n = 1500) from a three-stage cluster sampling. All the screen positive (estimated n = 900) and 10% of screen negative (estimated n = 360) will receive the full diagnostic interview (K-SADS-E to obtain the pregnancy, developmental and medical history. For students who leave of absence, we will visit them at home to complete all the assessments.

The investigators anticipate this study will provide the prevalence of a wide range of developmental and psychiatric disorders in children and our results will also provide a comprehensive risk factors for each psychiatric disorder identified in this study, including neurocognitive, developmental, familiar, and environmental factors. The individual, combined, and interactive effects of these predictors can be identified in this study. This study will definitely provide precious data for the government to develop a preventive program for mental disorders and a promotion program for mental health and well-being.