Increased exposure to health and social factors significantly raised the risk of poor mental well-being in adolescents, with boys seeing PR from 1.59 to 24.52 and girls from 2.56 to 16.23.
There is a strong cumulative dose-response association between the number of health and social risk factors and poor mental well-being in adolescents.
Absolute Event Rate: 0% vs 0%
Background While numerous studies have explored factors contributing to poor mental health, few have examined the combined influence of multiple health and social factors and their cumulative effect. This study specifically aimed to analyze the cumulative effect of multiple health and social factors associated with poor mental well‐being in school‐aged adolescents (12–18 years old) in Central Catalonia during the 2021–2022 academic year. Methods Cross‐sectional study using data from the 2021–2022 DESKcohort project, with a total sample of 9265 high‐school aged students in Central Catalonia (49.2% boys and 50.8% girls). To identify factors associated with poor mental well‐being (score < 44 on the Warwick‐Edinburgh Mental Well‐being Scale), Multilevel Poisson regression models with robust variance were estimated, obtaining prevalence ratios (PR) with their respective 95% confidence intervals (95% CI). The cumulative effect score was derived by summing the factors that were associated with poor mental well‐being. Results We observe a gradient where the likelihood of experiencing poor mental well‐being increases statistically significantly with exposure to a greater number of multiple health and social factors. In boys, the prevalence ratio increases statistically significantly from PR = 1.59 ( p < .040) to PR = 24.52 ( p < .001) for 1 and 10 health and social factors combined, and in girls, increases statistically significantly from PR = 2.56 ( p < .001) to PR = 16.23 ( p < .001) for 1 and 11 health and social factors combined, respectively. Conclusion The findings of this study highlight the multifaceted nature of mental health and the co‐presence of multiple axes of inequality, where overall health, family and psychosocial factors, and health behaviors form a cumulative association with adolescents' poor mental well‐being.
Robles‐Muñoz et al. (Wed,) reported a other. Increased exposure to health and social factors significantly raised the risk of poor mental well-being in adolescents, with boys seeing PR from 1.59 to 24.52 and girls from 2.56 to 16.23.