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Poster #56 - Infant Temperament Predicts Mental Disorders in Childhood: Prospective Cohort Study

Sat, March 23, 12:45 to 2:00pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Objective:
Infant temperament has been associated with later psychiatric symptoms (Gartstein et al., 2012; Abulizi et al., 2017) and mental disorders (Sayal et al., 2013) in cohort studies using data from questionnaires and/or interviews, but these studies are limited to symptoms at specific time points during childhood and rarely separate diagnostic groups. Thus we examined whether temperament at six months of age predicts mental disorders during childhood, from birth to 6–10 years of age.
Methods:
Participants included 2600 children (1329 boys (51.1%)) from a Finnish prospective cohort study PREDO. Participating children were born in 2006–2010. Temperament was mother-rated at the mean age of six months (range 4.2–12.5) using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised, and all mental disorder diagnoses given according to the ICD-10 until the end of the follow-up period in 2016 (6–10 years of age) were collected from Finnish nation-wide Hospital Discharge Register. Hazard ratios (HR) for having any mental disorder (includes all F-diagnoses except for the intellectual disabilities; n = 201, 7.7%), any emotional disorder (includes F92, F93, F30-39, F40-48; n = 29, 1.1%), any conduct disorder (includes F91, F92, F90.1, F63; n=14, 0.5%), attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, F90; n = 30, 1.2%), or autism-spectrum disorders (F84; n = 18, 0.7%) were predicted by three temperament super factors, namely Orienting/Regulatory Capacity, Surgency, and Negative Affectivity. Scores in temperament variables were transformed into standard deviation (SD) units. We used Cox regression analyses, in which the age of the child at psychiatric diagnosis, moving abroad or the end of the follow-up was used as an endpoint for the survival age variable. Analyses were stratified by sex and adjusted for birth year and the age of the child at temperament assessment (model 1) and additionally for maternal education (model 2).
Results:
As shown in Table 1, higher Orienting/Regulatory Capacity at infancy was associated with increased risk of any mental disorder during childhood. Higher Negative Affectivity and Surgency were associated with increased risk for emotional disorders. Finally, higher Orienting/Regulatory Capacity and Surgency also predicted higher risk for ADHD diagnosis. Lower maternal education accounted for the associations only partly. Temperament did not predict conduct disorders (p-values > 0.06) or autism-spectrum disorders (p-values > 0.08).
Conclusion:
Mother-assessed temperament already in infancy may be predictive of later need of treatment for mental disorders during childhood.

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