Kids' health declined over the past 17 years: Study
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Children's physical and mental health declined across multiple measures over the 17 years ending in 2023, according to new research led by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Why it matters: The findings published Monday in JAMA offer some academic evidence to back up Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's focus on improving children's health.
- But pediatric health experts wrote in an accompanying editorial that other administration actions like questioning the safety of childhood vaccines are undermining children's health.
What they found: U.S. children ages 3 to 17 were 15-20% more likely to have a chronic health condition in 2023 compared with 2011, the study finds.
- The prevalence of anxiety, autism and vision problems, among other conditions, increased significantly in two separate sets of data analyzed by the researchers.
- Asthma rates decreased over the time period.
- The researchers analyzed results of five nationally representative surveys, national mortality statistics and a database of pediatric electronic health records across 10 states.
By the numbers: The childhood obesity rate rose from 17% in 2007-2008 to nearly 21% from 2021-2023.
- Early-onset menstruation increased from about 9% to nearly 15% over the same time period.
- 7.7% of kids ages 2-19 had limitations in activity due to a chronic disease in 2008-2009. That increased to more than 9% in 2019.
- About 26% of high schoolers had depressive symptoms in 2009, while almost 40% experienced depressive symptoms in 2023.
Zoom out: The paper compares mortality rates for U.S. kids with 18 other high-income nations, including Australia, Canada, Japan and Spain.
- U.S. infants and kids were both about 80% likelier to die than their counterparts abroad between 2007 and 2022.
- 315,795 U.S. children were likelier to die than if they were born in one of the comparison countries, the paper found.
- U.S. kids were 15 times more likely to die from a firearm than kids in other countries examined.
The bottom line: "To me, it's a huge wake-up call that we really are failing kids right now," lead study author Christopher Forrest, a professor of pediatrics at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told Science in an interview about the research.
- "We need to not just examine the food environment, the chemical environment, or the technological environment, but the whole ecosystem that kids are growing up in."
