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Background: Guidelines recommend screening for psychiatric co-morbidities in patients with congenital heart defects alongside cardiac outpatient follow-ups. These recommendations are not implemented in Denmark. This study aimed to investigate the psychiatric co-morbidities in children and adolescents with Fontan circulation in Denmark and to evaluate the feasibility of an online screening measure for psychiatric disorders., Methods: Children, adolescents, and their families answered the Development and Well-Being Assessment questionnaire and a questionnaire about received help online. Development and Well-Being Assessment ratings present psychiatric diagnoses in accordance with ICD-10 and DSM-5. Parent-reported received psychiatric help is also presented. Feasibility data are reported as participation rate (completed Development and Well-Being Assessments) and parental/adolescent acceptability from the feasibility questionnaire., Results: The participation rate was 27%. Of the participating children and adolescents, 53% (ICD-10)/59% (DSM-5) met full diagnostic criteria for at least one psychiatric diagnosis. Of these, 50% had not received any psychiatric or psychological help. Only 12% of participants had an a priori psychiatric diagnosis., Conclusions: We found that a large proportion of children and adolescents with Fontan circulation are underdiagnosed and undertreated for psychiatric disorders. The results from our study emphasise the need for psychiatric screening in this patient group. Development and Well-Being Assessment may be too comprehensive for online electronic screening in children and adolescents with CHD.

Background: Obesity represents a tremendous global health problem. Studies over the past decade have suggested that food addiction (FA), that is, physical cravings for certain foods - high in fat/sugar - and addiction-like overeating of these types of food, is a likely contributor to the obesity epidemic. While FA has been studied extensively, there are some significant gaps in the literature that need to be addressed: (I) Most estimates of the prevalence of FA are based on nonprobability sampling, which significantly limits the representativeness of the prevalence estimates. (II) Although addiction disorders are prevalent among individuals with mental disorders, large studies of FA among patients with clinically diagnosed mental disorders are lacking. (III) Most addiction disorders are heritable, but the familial transmission of FA remains virtually unknown. (IV) Due to a relative lack of longitudinal studies, little is known about the risk factors for and outcomes of FA. To close these gaps in the literature, we designed the Food Addiction Denmark (FADK) Project., Methods: The FADK study is a nationwide survey with retrospective and prospective register-based elements. Four randomly sampled cohorts were invited to participate in the survey: 5000 adults and 3750 adolescents from the general population and 5000 adults and 3529 adolescents with a mental disorder. The FADK questionnaire includes the Yale Food Addiction Scale 2.0 and rating scales measuring psychopathology. Data from Danish health and socio-economic registers will be linked to all invitees., Discussion: We expect that the FADK Project will contribute significantly to our understanding of FA.

Background: Based on prevalence studies and the few incidence studies of pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs) the prevalence and incidence of these disorders have been claimed to be increasing., Method: The annual and age-specific prevalence and incidence rates of childhood autism, atypical autism, Asperger's disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) in Denmark during the period 1971--2000 in children younger than 10 years were estimated using data from the Danish Psychiatric Central Register., Results: A total of 2.4 million children younger than 10 years were followed and 2061 cases with the PDDs studied were identified. Generally, the prevalence and incidence rates of the PDDs studied were stable until the early 1990s after which an increase in the occurrence of all disorders was seen, until 2000. The annual incidence rate per 10000 children younger than 10 years was 2.0 for childhood autism, 0.7 for atypical autism, 1.4 for Asperger's disorder, and 3.0 for PDD-NOS in 2000. We calculated a 'corrected' prevalence of childhood autism at 11.8, atypical autism at 3.3, Asperger's disorder at 4.7, and PDD-NOS at 14.6 per 10,000 children younger than 10 years on 1 January 2001., Conclusions: We found that the estimated prevalences of the PDDs studied were probably underestimated. Furthermore, the increasing prevalence and incidence rates during the 1990s may well be explained by changes in the registration procedures and more awareness of the disorders, although a true increase in the incidence cannot be ruled out.