ESPE Abstracts

Background: Adolescents affected by chronic diseases need a specific support and care, in a contest dedicated to them and not integrated with children. They often ask a specific attention to their asks, only partially secondary to their primary disease.

Objective and hypotheses: The need of a support in communication of the diagnosis, in the adherence to a long-life or to a prolonged treatment and a long follow-up, with repeated blood samples, strumental examinations induced us to create a multidisciplinary day service exclusively dedicated to adolescents.

Method: In a 3 years experience we selected 30 adolescents (14 males and 16 females) with chronic endocrinological diseases (GHD, panhypopituitarism), between all the patients who followed the Unit of Paediatric Endocrinology, and proposed them specific tests, addressed to the evaluation of the Anxiety Scale, the Eating Attitude Test (Eat 26), the CBCL (evaluating comportamental attitudes and social relations), the CRS-L (evaluating psychosomatic problems, inattention, and emotional instability).

Results: The Anxiety Scale was pathological in 12/30 patients (40%; seven males and five females). The Eat 26 was borderline only in two patients (7%; two females). The Conners’ Rating Scales-Revised (CRS-R) was pathological in ten patients (33%; three males and seven females, with a significant prevalence in females). The CBCL was pathological in six (four males and two females). The psychological support was integrated with the evaluation of the whole family, and personalized with the objective to remove the problems linked to the chronic disease.

Conclusion: Eating disorders were described in females, as reported in literature, with a significant incidence (7%) in adolescents with chronic endocrine diseases as GHD. Chronic endocrine diseases, expecially if they need a long-life treatment, favourite psychological disabilities and relational consequences. The multispecialistic assistance assured to those patients with pathological skills to the tests a follow-up twice/month, with a significant reduction of the pathological items, expecially for the CBCL and the CRS-R.