Photo Credit: Pranithan Chorruangsak

The following is a summary of “Assessing Readiness for Transition From Pediatric to Adult Gender Affirming Care,” published in the February 2024  issue of Pediatrics by Katz, et al.

Teenagers’ health is very important when they move from childhood to adult care. Not much is known about how to help transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) adolescents make the best move to adult care. The Transition Readiness and Assessment Questionnaire (TRAQ) has been proven to work with other groups of adolescents but has yet to be tested with TGNB teens or young adults. 

For a study, researchers sought to test the TRAQ with TGNB patients, describe trends of transition readiness, and find factors linked to transition readiness.

The TRAQ was added to the standard care for patients and their caretakers in the spring of 2021 in a big urban juvenile gender program. They looked at old charts and compared TRAQ answers based on demographic and clinical information. They got TRAQs from 153 teens (mean age: 19 years, standard deviation: 2.36 years; range: 11–24 years). With a Cronbach alpha of 0.926, the TRAQ showed it was reliable. Patients did worse on the TRAQ sections of keeping track of health problems and talking with doctors. They did their best to handle their medications and make their appointments. High TRAQ results were linked to older age and just attending the meeting.

They looked at a group of TGNB adolescents and found that the TRAQ is internally reliable. Higher TRAQ scores and trends found in TRAQ score subdomains give them a better idea of what TGNB adolescents were ready to move on to adult gender-affirming care needs. In the future, they should monitor people’s readiness for change, develop and test ways to help them prepare, and look at how things went after the transition.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X23004810