[Rehabilitation of children and adolescents]

In recent years a significant increase in most chronic mental and physical illnesses among children and adolescents was reported. Thus, medical child and adolescent rehabilitation plays a major role. Therefore, early diagnosis and multimodal intervention in childhood and adolescence is necessary, to prevent a chronic course of disease. Patient education programs have been shown to be effective in the treatment of chronic illnesses. Those programs are mostly aimed to improve the compliant behavior and disease management. Consecutively, the health status and quality of life should be improved. Due to the implementation of guidelines and evaluation studies the quality of rehabilitation programs was ameliorated during the past 15 years. However, future research should develop flexible rehabilitation programs in particular (rehabilitation duration, rehabilitation near or far from place of residence, rehabilitation chain with in-patient, partially out-patient, and out-patient programs), whose effectiveness has to be proven.