Peer-reviewed article
Longitudinal Associations Between Anxiety and Depression in Transition From Childhood to Adolescence.
Keskin G, Plamondon A, Tough S, Madigan S ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study followed 1,499 Canadian children from age 9 to 12 over four years to understand how anxiety and depression relate to each other during the transition to adolescence. The researchers used statistical methods to separate stable differences between children from changes within individual children over time. They found that while anxiety and depression tend to occur together, depression appeared to drive increases in anxiety rather than the other way around.
Key points
- Sample of 1,499 children (47.8% girls) from All Our Families cohort measured four times between 2020-2023
- Strong positive correlation between anxiety and depression at the between-person level
- Cross-lagged effects were unidirectional: depression predicted anxiety, but anxiety did not predict depression
- Significant effects from Time 2 to Time 3 and Time 3 to Time 4
- Findings consistent across both sexes
Limitations
The study uses only self-reported measures of anxiety and depression from a longitudinal cohort, so results may not generalise to populations outside Canada or to clinical presentations. The study cannot establish causal mechanisms, only temporal associations between symptom changes.
Abstract
Background The transition from childhood to adolescence is often accompanied by an increase in internalizing problems, particularly anxiety and depression. Although anxiety and depression are conceptually distinct, they also frequently co-occur. Some evidence suggests that anxiety may precede depression; however, the longitudinal dynamics between the two remain unclear. In the current study, we used a random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) to disentangle between-person stability from within-person fluctuations. This approach allows us to examine how changes in anxiety and depression predict each other over time during the transition from childhood to adolescence. Methods Participating children (n = 1499; 47.8% girls) from the All Our Families (AOF) cohort reported on their anxiety and depression using the Behavior Assessment System for Children - Third Edition (BASC-3) four times between 2020 and 2023 (mean age at Time 1 = 9.66 years; SD = 0.81). Results At the between-person level, which captures stability in the levels of anxiety and depression, there was a strong positive correlation. At the within-person level, which captures within-person variations over time, concurrent associations were significant at most time points. However, cross-lagged effects were unidirectional, with depression predicting anxiety, but not vice versa. These effects were significant from Time 2 to Time 3 and from Time 3 to Time 4 and were consistent across sexes. Conclusions The findings underscore the significance of the timing of child-specific effects between anxiety and depression, indicating that depression, rather than anxiety, may serve as the primary driving factor in the longitudinal association between the two symptom clusters.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Observational longitudinal study using random intercept cross-lagged panel modelling to examine within-person fluctuations in anxiety and depression
- Population
- 1,499 Canadian children (47.8% girls) from All Our Families cohort, mean age 9.66 years at baseline
Key finding
Strong positive correlation between anxiety and depression at between-person level