Depression Burden Up 30% Amongst US Teens

New data shows that depression has bumped asthma out of the top spot for disease burden amongst US and Canadian youth.

Depression has become leading cause of disability burden amongst US and Canadian teens

The recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, perpetrated by 20 year-old Adam Lanza, has intensified the discussion about how mental health is handled and documented in the US. Officials have not provided information about Lanza’s motivation and state of mind, and many are rightfully quick to point out that it is wrong to equate mental illness with the fatal sociopathic actions of a small group of individuals. The conversation about access to mental health care should, however, take into account new data showing an increasing contribution of mental and behavioral disorders to deterioration in the health-related quality of life among teenagers in the US and Canada over the last two decades, and increases elsewhere around the globe.

The estimation of ‘years lived with disabilities’, or YLDs, is used as a collective metric to determine how much a particular disorder deprives the population of healthy years of life during a particular window of time. In 2010 just as in 1990, depression ranked as the number two contributor of YLDs, affecting 4% of the global population, eclipsed only by back pain that affected almost 10% of population worldwide. Among 10 to 14 year olds, the top contributor worldwide is iron deficiency. Asthma had been the largest contributor to YLDs for youths in that age range in the US and Canada in 1990, but the study published in The Lancet on Thursday led by researchers at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, Seattle showed that in this group depression surpassed asthma to claim the number one spot in 2010. In that group, the collective number of ‘years lost to disability’ grew from about 140,000 in 1990 to almost 180,000 in 2010, a 30% increase. Notably, global figures for the same age group show that the number of years lost to disability from depression grew from 4.9 million in 1990 to 5.5 million in 2010, a 13% increase as shown in the graphs below.

More here blogs.nature.com/spoonful/2012/12/depression-has-become-leading-cause-of-disability-burden-amongst-us-and-candian-teens.html