Kids who own smartphones before age 13 have worse mental health outcomes: Study

Is owning a smartphone more or less dangerous than owning a cat?

"Cat Ownership Linked to Increased Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests" https://www.sciencealert.com/owning-a-cat-could-double-your-...

> "After adjusting for covariates, we found that individuals exposed to cats had approximately twice the odds of developing schizophrenia,"

My first question would be: or is it that cat owners are schizophrenic are more likely to get a cat?

I'm not answering that question, but I do want to quote your article. From the bottom:

> Results were inconsistent across studies, but those of higher quality suggested that associations in unadjusted models might have been due to factors that could have influenced the results.

> One study found no significant association between owning a cat before age 13 and later developing schizophrenia, but it did identify a significant link when narrowing down cat ownership to a specific period (ages 9 to 12). This inconsistency suggests that the critical window for cat exposure is not well defined.

> A study in the US, which involved 354 psychology students, didn't find a connection between owning a cat and schizotypy scores. However, those who had received a cat bite had higher scores when compared to those who had not.

> Another study, which included people with and without mental disorders, discovered a connection between cat bites and higher scores on tests measuring particular psychological experiences. But they suggested other pathogens, such as Pasteurella multocida, may be responsible instead.

> Before we can make any firm interpretations, the researchers reiterate that we need better and broader research.

Obviously, because people like cats, they are good, and because people don’t like phones, they are bad.

There's also a decade plus of various "Net Children Go Mobile" annual surveys across major tecnological countries that plot the diffusion of phone use and ownership by age and country.

Leading to a large ANOVA table of years, countries, ages, mental health statitics, etc.

Yes, Denmark measures these things is ways different to the UK and both differ from the US.

All the same, each being reasonably internally consisent across time means trends can be picked after normalising.

The case for whether encroaching phone use does correlate with increased early onset mental issue diagnoses becomes a consideration of thresholds and variances.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283320908_Net_Child...

Schizophrenia is a subset of "doing worse mentally". For a proper comparison you need to check overall mental health, not just schizophrenia, which is a rare condition.