Multimorbidity in Children and Youth Across the Life Course (MY LIFE)

The Multimorbidity in Children and Youth Across the Life-course (MY LIFE) Study began in 2017, recruiting children aged 2-16 years from McMaster Children’s hospital; it is currently in its 6th year of follow-up.

Results so far showed that 25% to 40% of children living with a long-term physical illness, like asthma or epilepsy, also had a mental illness, like depression or anxiety. We call this multimorbidity. We found that a child’s age, sex, and level of disability, the caregivers mental health and the family’s income level were related to whether a child or youth would experience multimorbidity. Some research shows that some children and youth who have a long-term physical illness have good mental health, but we don’t know what happens as children and youth get older and become young adults. Renewed funding from CIHR will now allow us to answer this question as we continue data collection for many years into the future.

Connecting with youth, who are currently 8 to 22 years of age, we will now look at:

Whose mental health improves over time, remains the same, and declines, and what things affect these changes;
Whether new patterns of multimorbidity start as children get older;
What things about their lives are related to mental illness over time;
How their use of mental health services changes as they get older.

We will also include the brothers and sisters of the children and youth participating in our study to allow us to make comparisons to children and youth who share the same family environment. We will link our data with health services data collected by the government as this gives us good quality information about service use.

This ongoing, longitudinal study will create new knowledge needed to help support mental health in children and youth living with physical illness.

This study is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.