The association of chronic physical illness and eating attitudes in school-aged children: A secondary analysis based on a community survey of the epidemiology and risk factors for eating and mood disorders in children.

Abstract

Children with chronic physical illness have twice the risk of psychosocial maladjustment as healthy children. One specific aspect of mental functioning is abnormal eating attitudes, hypothesized to be an early stage of an eating disorder. To date, there has been no study of the association of a variety of physical chronic illnesses with a specific psychiatric syndrome in a diagnostically heterogeneous population, comparing chronically ill children with healthy children. This study examined the association between chronic illness and eating attitudes in a population of school children from Western Quebec. A checklist of chronic medical conditions was added to the parent questionnaire in order to determine presence of chronic illness. There were two objectives of this thesis. The first objective was to determine whether chronic illness was associated with eating attitudes in children as measured by the Eating Attitudes Test. The second study objective was to determine whether there was a meaningful group difference in othcr psychometric scores of depression, family functioning and stress between children with a chronic illness and children without a chronic illness. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)