This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Pediatrics  • Pediatrics, Other  • Psychiatry  • Depression  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: Dr Costello and colleagues¹ reported that children had fewer symptoms of conduct and oppositional defiant disorders ("behavioral symptoms") after an income intervention that moved their families out of poverty, but that anxiety and depression symptoms ("emotional symptoms") were unaffected. After leaving poverty, however, ex-poor children were significantly less likely to have emotional symptoms than while in poverty, and were then no more likely to report emotional symptoms than were children who were never poor. Furthermore, ex-poor children were less likely to have an emotional symptom after leaving poverty than were persistently poor children, but this difference achieved borderline significance (P = .05) and was reported as a negative result.

Given these findings, more direct statistical evaluation would have aided the authors' assessment of "whether the effect of moving out of poverty applied equally to emotional and behavioral symptoms." For example, the difference between ex-poor and never . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Brady Case, MD
Department of Psychiatry
New York University School of Medicine
New York, NY

RELATED ARTICLES

Effect of Poverty on Emotional Symptoms in Children—Reply
E. Jane Costello, Scott N. Compton, Gordon Keeler, and Adrian Angold
JAMA. 2004;291(4):424.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Relationships Between Poverty and Psychopathology: A Natural Experiment
E. Jane Costello, Scott N. Compton, Gordon Keeler, and Adrian Angold
JAMA. 2003;290(15):2023-2029.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT