However, performing well in school strongly predicts future wealth, health and life satisfaction, 11, 12 and an important body of research on educational attainment in children and adolescence has emerged. 10Įven though PEs are well-established as an important risk indicator of impairing psychological difficulties, knowledge on the potential socioeconomic impact of PEs is still scarce. 6–8 A World Mental Health Survey found that life-time PEs were associated with decreased health-related quality of life (HRQoL), 9 and a recent study found that PEs in preadolescence predicted low life satisfaction in early adulthood. 1 However, PEs are often associated with subjective distress and decreased global functioning, 2, 3 and have been suggested to index severity of nonpsychotic psychopathology, 4, 5 and among children and adolescents, PEs have been found to be associated with psychotic as well as nonpsychotic mental illness later in life. Psychotic experiences (PEs) are common among preadolescents and often part of normal development. In conclusion, PEs are important in mental health screening of preadolescents and identify a group of young people with increased healthcare service-use throughout adolescence and who report poorer HRQoL in adolescence, over and above parent-rated general psychopathology of their child. After adjustments, PEs remained independently associated with higher costs and poorer HRQoL, but not with poorer school performance. The costs for individuals with PEs were higher for mental healthcare services across primary to tertiary care, but not for somatic care. Preadolescents who reported PEs had higher average total healthcare costs over the following 5 years. However, preadolescents with PEs more often reported HRQoL within the lowest 10th percentile (OR = 2.74 ). PEs were associated with slightly poorer school performance. We adjusted for perinatal and family sociodemographic adversities, prior parental mental illness and healthcare use, child IQ-estimate at age 11–12, and parent-rated general psychopathology of their child. Furthermore, HRQoL was assessed for a subsample of the children at age 16–17.
A total of 1607 preadolescents from the general population Copenhagen Child Cohort 2000 were assessed for PEs at age 11–12 years and followed up over 5 years using register-based data on mental and somatic healthcare costs, and school performance at age 16. We aimed to estimate how preadolescent PEs were associated with later healthcare costs, school performance, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in adolescence.
The implications of PEs on socioeconomic outcomes, including educational attainment, are scarcely described.
Psychotic experiences (PEs) are common in the general population in preadolescence.