July 12, 2018
By Scott Baltic
NEW YORK—Psychotic experiences before age 13 are markers of increased risk for such disordered-eating behaviors as binge eating, fasting and purging in late adolescence, according to a new U.K. study.
A third of children with psychotic experiences, such as delusions or hallucinations, by age 13 reported some disordered-eating behaviors by age 18, researchers report in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, online June 22.
“If a child has a psychotic experience, this should trigger a more in-depth mental health evaluation and guidance for the child and the parents,” said Dr. R. Scott Benson, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in practice in Pensacola, Florida, who was not involved in the study.
“In most situations, the psychotic experience is not associated with other behavior disturbance in this age group,” he told Reuters Health by email. “As a consequence, it is dismissed as a normal variant: ‘She’s just upset. She will outgrow it.’”
However, Dr. Benson continued, the new study and previous research make it clear that “too often she doesn’t. We need to recognize the severity of this symptom as a marker for future problems. If those problems do develop, they will respond better to early treatment.”
For the study, Dr. Francesca Solmi and colleagues at University College London used data from a longitudinal birth cohort of nearly 14,000 children born in Avon, England, in the early 1990s.
Data on psychotic experiences in 6,361 children were collected at clinic assessments when the children were nearly age 13. Psychotic experiences were excluded if they could be attributed to fever or an absence of sleep.
Most of the 734 participants (12%) who had psychotic experiences were girls and reported greater depressive symptoms and autistic traits than those without such experiences. They also tended to have younger mothers who were single, separated or widowed, had lower levels of education and more symptoms of depression.