Does Depression Worsen Any Medical Conditions In Children/Adolescents?

Question: Does depression worsen any medical conditions in children/adolescents?

Answer: Depression can make worse many medical conditions. In fact, one could probably argue that almost all medical conditions are more difficult for a child or patient to tolerate when that child or patient also happens to be depressed.

It's a tricky question because often those very medical conditions are the stressful events that have created the depressive symptomatology in the first place. We know, for example, that children or adolescents who undergo transplants, who undergo treatments for malignancies, children with cancer, and who are also depressed, will find themselves suffering more depressive symptoms in the settings of many of these treatments.

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The other tricky part of this is that these conditions for which they're being treated have treatments that are associated with depressive symptoms. So it's unclear whether it's the conditions themselves that are causing the depression or the treatments for the conditions.

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