Apr 3 : A study has confirmed a previous finding, that children who have at least one depressed parent, are more likely to use costly health-care services, such as visits to the emergency room and specialists consultations.

Dr. Marion Sills, lead author of the study and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. Said that the study is reliable because the study is a larger one and the data is more reliable.

“We had a much larger study. This data is more reliable.” Sills said.

Around 47 percent of parents may suffer depression, which can adversely affect child behavioral, developmental, psychological and physiologic health. But previous studies pointing to this association have generally been small in size or suffered from other methodological limitations.

For this study, Sills and her colleagues looked at health-care use patterns for almost 70,000 children, from infants to 17-year-olds, who were enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente of Colorado health plan between July 1997 and December 2001. More than one-third (25,000) of the children had at least one parent with a diagnosis of depression. The rest of the children served as a control group.

Dr. Jane Ripperger-Suhler, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine said that the study has shown the importance of making treatment more accessible and ‘comprehensive’.

“It makes sense to me for a lot of reasons, and I think that we’ve been connecting parental depression to lots of different kinds of problems in children for a long time, and it’s great to have a really big study to support that. The course of action is, first of all, let’s treat parents and, second of all, maybe we need to make that treatment easier to access and more comprehensive,” Live Science quoted Ripperger-Suhler , as saying.

The study is published in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics. (ANI)