MONDAY, March 17, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- Nearly 1 in 3 children live with a chronic condition that could significantly affect their health for the rest of their lives, a new study says.
Chronic illnesses affected more than 30% of children ages 5 to 17 by 2018, up from around 23% in 1999, researchers report in the journal Academic Pediatrics.
This adds up to about 130,000 more children each year being diagnosed with a chronic illness.
This increase has been driven by diagnoses of ADHD/ADD, autism, asthma, prediabetes and mood disorders like depression or anxiety, lead researcher Lauren Wisk, an assistant professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said in a news release.
“The prevalence of childhood conditions is currently higher than previous estimates suggest,” she said. “Youth who are subject to socioeconomic vulnerability such as having less education, lower income, are on public insurance, or unemployed are all more likely to live with a chronic condition than youth with socioeconomic advantages.”
For the study, researchers analyzed data on more than 236,000 people between 5 and 25 years of age who participated in the National Health Interview Survey between 1999 and 2018.
The results also showed that chronic illness increased among 18- to 25-year-olds, rising from about 19% to 29% between 1999 and 2018 -- an additional 80,000 young adults per year.
Nearly all these conditions are treatable with access to high-quality health care, but many children don’t have that access, Wisk said.
“Most youth with chronic conditions need to access health and social services for the rest of their lives, but our health system is not set up to successfully move young people from pediatric to adult focused care and so many of these youth are at risk of disengaging with care and experiencing disease exacerbations,” she said.
“We should invest in assisting these youth in engaging appropriately with healthcare across their lifespan in order to protect their health and well-being, and to facilitate their maximum participation in society with respect to education, vocation, social groups, and community spaces,” Wisk concluded.
More information
The American Academy of Pediatrics has more on chronic conditions in childhood.
SOURCE: UCLA, news release, March 10, 2025
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