Citation

Crowell JA. Child Adolesc. Ment. Health 2019; 24(2): 149-151.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/camh.12290

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Vella and colleagues (this issue) report on children in the kindergarten cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) study, using predictors from age 4 years to identify six trajectories of mental health risk from ages 4-12. Somewhat surprisingly, they find that among some predictable candidates for risk, such as sex and family income, that sports participation at age four emerges as a novel predictor of low difficulty with respect to mental health trajectories across the next 8 years. Is this a case of mens sana in corpore sano? Or is sports participation, that is, swimming, dancing, gymnastics, and team sports, a proxy for other factors? What can the various predictors and the trajectories of mental health risk from this longitudinal study tell us about interventions to reduce risk?

Language: en

Keywords

development; epidemiologic studies; Longitudinal studies; risk factors