Psychiatric Comorbidities and Quality‐of‐Life Burden in Pediatric Patients With Vitiligo: A Systematic Review and Meta‐Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Introduction Vitiligo is an autoimmune condition that causes depigmented skin patches, often leading to challenges such as stigma, bullying, and poor self‐esteem in pediatric populations. These challenges may contribute to psychiatric comorbidities and impaired quality of life (QoL). Pediatric‐specific data remain limited. Objectives To synthesize current evidence on psychiatric comorbidities and QoL outcomes in pediatric vitiligo and identify factors associated with increased psychosocial burden. Methods PubMed, Embase, and MEDLINE were systematically searched through March 15, 2025, for primary English‐language studies involving patients aged 0–18 years with vitiligo and validated psychiatric or QoL outcomes. Study quality was assessed using Oxford Centre for Evidence‐Based Medicine Levels of Evidence. Meta‐analyses were performed where possible, with 95% confidence intervals and I 2 for heterogeneity. Certainty of evidence was evaluated using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation framework. Results Fourteen studies ( n = 1576) were included. Pooled means for depression (CDI: 9.93) and anxiety scores (STAI‐State: 37.07; STAI‐Trait: 38.27) did not exceed thresholds for probable clinical diagnosis, though heterogeneity was considerable. Pooled means for QoL burden (CDLQI: 3.00; PedsQL: 80.55) suggested mild‐to‐moderate QoL impairment. Multiple individual comparative studies reported greater psychiatric symptom burden and higher prevalence of depression and anxiety among vitiligo patients versus controls. Subgroup findings from selected studies also suggested worse QoL in adolescents and those with extensive or visible lesions. Conclusions Pediatric vitiligo is associated with elevated psychiatric comorbidity prevalence, symptom burden, and mild‐to‐moderate QoL impairment among included studies. These findings highlight the need for clinicians to integrate psychosocial assessment into routine care. Current evidence further emphasizes incorporating routine mental health screening and multidisciplinary support into pediatric dermatology practice for children with vitiligo, although conclusions are restricted by limited and heterogeneous data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".