Children’s health declines in last 17 years, study finds

The physical and mental health of U.S. children has declined over the past 17 years, according to a new study.

The findings, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, charted trends in children’s health in the U.S. from 2007 to 2023.

“The surprising part of the study wasn’t with any single statistic; it was that there’s 170 indicators, eight data sources, all showing the same thing: a generalized decline in kids’ health,” Dr. Christopher Forrest, one of the authors of the study, told the Associated Press.

The study found that U.S. children were 15% to 20% more likely to have a chronic condition such as anxiety, depression or sleep apnea than U.S. children in 2011.

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Childhood obesity rates for U.S. children rose from 17% in 2007-2008 to about 21% from 2021-2023, according to the findings.

American kids also experienced an increase in early onset of menstruation, trouble sleeping, limitations in activity, physical symptoms, depressive symptoms and loneliness during the study period.

The paper also compared the mortality rates of U.S. children to kids in other high-income countries, finding that American children were around 1.8 times more likely to die than those in the other countries.

Being born premature and sudden unexpected death were much higher among U.S. infants, and firearm-related incidents and motor vehicle crashes were much more common among 1-19-year-old American youths than among those the same age in other countries examined.

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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought children’s health to the forefront of the national policy conversation with his “Make America Healthy Again” plan.

An editorial that accompanied the new study, however, argued that the Trump administration’s actions – including cuts to federal health agencies, Medicaid and scientific research – are not likely to reverse the trend.

“The health of kids in America is not as good as it should be, not as good as the other countries, and the current policies of this administration are definitely going to make it worse,” Dr. Frederick Rivara, a pediatrician and researcher at the Seattle Children’s Hospital and UW Medicine in Seattle, told the AP.

Forrest, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said “kids are the canaries in the coal mine,” and that the findings reflect bigger problems with America’s health at large.

“We have to step back and take some lessons from the ecological sustainability community and say: Let’s look at the ecosystem that kids are growing up in. And let’s start on a kind of neighborhood-by-neighborhood, city-by-city basis, examining it,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.