• Posted July 17, 2025

Chronically Ill Kids Carry Heavy Emotional Burden

Kids coping with chronic health problems like asthma also are struggling with the emotional burden of stress, fear and sadness, a new study says.

Almost 94% of comments posted online by chronically ill kids and their caregivers expressed negative feelings like disgust, sadness and fear, according to results published recently in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

Fewer than 6% of the comments were positive, researchers said.

“I was particularly struck by how clearly children’s emotional responses aligned with specific comorbidity patterns – for example, fear and sadness were especially dominant among those discussing multiple hospital visits or long-term medication,” lead researcher Israel Oluwalade, a master’s graduate at the University of Plymouth in the U.K., said in a news release.

For the study, researchers used AI to analyze posts placed by 389 children or their caregivers between 2008 and 2023 on Care Opinion, a U.K. social media platform that allows people to share their experiences with health care services.

Sentiments expressed by the posts were first categorized as positive, negative or neutral, and then further sorted into specific emotions like sad, fear, disgust, neutral, satisfied or amazed, the study says.

Sadness was the most often expressed emotion, reflected in 3 of 5 posts (61%), researchers found. Fear and disgust were next most frequent, each showing up in 1 of every 6 posts (15%).

“Sadness is frequently linked to experiences involving physical pain, mental health struggles, and difficult treatment journeys, as suggested by terms like ‘pain,’ ‘hospital,’ and ‘mental health,’ ” researchers wrote.

Fear tended to relate to uncertainty around treatments or medical emergencies, while disgust tended to reflect dissatisfaction with health care services, the study says.

Children with conditions like asthma, chronic pain and cancer showed particularly high emotional distress, particularly if they were suffering from multiple health problems at once, researchers found.

For example, “asthma patients reported more negative experiences when dealing with arthritis, COPD, and cancer concurrently,” researchers wrote. “Diabetes management became especially complex when combined with asthma, arthritis, or cancer.” 

Senior researcher Shang-Ming Zhou, a professor of e-health at the University of Plymouth, said the research breaks new ground.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to analyze the sentiments and emotions of pediatric patients using social media data,” he said in a news release.

“Our findings bring to light the deeply emotional journey patients with multiple long-term health issues go through, and fills a critical gap in knowledge for healthcare professionals and agencies,” Zhou added.

The 6% of messages classified as positive tended to focus on the efforts of health care workers to help their young patients, researchers said.

“What also surprised me most was the unexpectedly high frequency of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘amazement’ in posts referencing kind staff or successful treatment episodes,” Oluwalade said. “It reminded me how digital expressions can reflect not only distress but also resilience and hope, even among young patients with complex conditions.”

More information

The Child Mind Institute has more on mental health in kids with chronic illness.

SOURCES: University of Plymouth, news release, July 10, 2025; Journal of Affective Disorders, June 21, 2025