Evaluating depression in a sample of children and adolescents with cancer in Greece

Several studies have found that serious illness increases the risk of depression. One of the most common psychiatric disorders related to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer is depression.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the rate of depression in children with cancer compared with that in healthy children.

The present study is an ongoing prospective study. The research group consisted of 80 children with cancer followed up by an oncology inpatient clinic of a Greek Children's hospital. The control group consisted of 84 healthy children. After parental consent was obtained, data were collected using the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and a socio-demographic data form.

At the time that this study was carried out, neither the research group nor the control group suffered from depression. In particular, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups with respect to symptoms of depression (mean = 5.88 for children with cancer vs. mean = 7.23 for healthy children, U = 3013, P = 0.25).

Our findings suggest that the children in this study with malignancies did not have higher depression scores than their healthy peers, although many previous surveys confirm that children with cancer are at high risk for depression.