Stress is the greatest health hazard of the 21st century according to the World Health Organization. Stress, however, is not only an issue for adults, but is now also increasing in children and adolescents.

Stress factors, such as exam anxiety, bad grades, high performance requirement at school, everyday deadline pressure, but also conflicts in the family, struggles with friends or the pursuit of social recognition have a negative impact on the organism and lead to complex disease patterns and increasing visits to the therapeutic practices.

Since the autonomic regulation in children and adolescents differs significantly from adults, the use of an autonomous functional diagnosis in children was only possible to a limited extent so far.

The ANS Analysis is the world's first system, which has integrated study-based children’s reference values after a discovery phase over many years. The new update complements the already existing standard values for 20 - 80 years with the age range of 10 - 19 years and now enables children and adolescents to assess the autonomic nervous system, to evaluate their stress resilience as well as their ability to regenerate themselves, and to prevent the stress cycle which leads to illnesses sooner or later.

In order to clarify the importance of correct standard values in children and adults, the graphs below show the measurement of a 14-year-old girl. Fig. 1 shows the measurement with the adjusted standard values for 10-19 years and Fig. 2 with the previous standard values for adults, which provides a false-positive result for the 14-year-old girl. Due to the adapted children's standard values, the urgent need for action becomes clear.

Fig. 1 Reference values for children

Fig. 2 Reference values for adults

The children's reference values are included in ANS Analysis Professional software.