Mata Synthesis on Psychosocial, Psychomotor and Neurocognitive Challenge of Chronically Ill Children and their Parents and Siblings

Chronic illness generally refers to physical, emotional, or developmental conditions that affect the child for a prolonged period of time. Many types of conditions can be considered chronic, including those that lead to a need for prescription medications; additional medical services; physical, occupational, or speech therapy; or treatment for an emotional, developmental, or behavioral problem. Being chronically ill have more early and late consequences in all aspects like physically, emotionally and cognitively. It is not only the child suffers with their consequences but their parents and siblings also suffer at least 50% of the suffering as like ill child. Here the systematic review was done to analyze challenges faced by chronically ill children in three major domains of health (cognitive, affective and psychomotor aspects) to get good theoretical support. Out of 78 studies 24 studies were selected from PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsycINFO. The 6 studies where qualitative and 18 studies were from quantitative approach. Studies from 1997 to 2017 were chosen for analyses, a total of 22743 chronically ill children were included in overall studies. 69 parents, 566 siblings of chronically ill children also included. The data’s were gathered as given in the study and important key results were summarized. The cognitive impact on chronic illness is poor school performance, increased school absenteeism. Pain and fatigue is important physical challenges, psychological distress like, depression, irritability, anxiety were most common affective challenges of those children. Parents and caregivers also suffering with psychological distress due to caregiver burden. Among siblings psychological functioning such as (i.e., depression, anxiety), peer activities, and cognitive development found to be major challenges. It is concluded that Intervention programs for the chronically ill children, siblings and families of children with a chronic illness should be developed to evaluate the intensity of the problems and to manage those problems.