Applied Psychiatric Epidemiology Across the Lifecourse

The APEAL lab congratulates Dr. Murray Weeks, who recently had a first-author paper accepted for publication in the journal Depression and Anxiety. The paper examined trajectories of anxious/depressive symptoms from childhood to adolescence, as well as early-life risk factors for trajectory group membership. Five trajectories were identified, including three suggesting child-onset symptoms and one suggesting symptom onset in adolescence. The child-onset trajectories were predicted by a greater number of risk factors, as compared with the adolescent-onset trajectory. Also, being female was a risk factor for the adolescent-onset trajectory, and several risk factors were more strongly predictive of trajectory group membership among females.

Click here to link to the paper

A new research paper from Michael Martin, a Ph.D. student in the APEAL lab, was recently published in BMC Psychiatry. The paper, titled “Mental Health Screening Tools in Correctional Institutions: A Systematic Review” highlights some promising mental health screening tools for use in jails and prisons.

APEAL lab research has been featured in a recent article for the Christian Science Monitor. The article highlights research on teen suicide and prevention, including a recent paper APEAL lab on suicide contagion. Click here to read more!

Congratulations to APEAL lab Ph.D. student Michael Martin, who was recently awarded a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. His current research is investigating rates of change in mental health problems over the first year of incarceration among prisoners serving sentences of two years or longer. The project will (1) explore factors and events that occur during imprisonment that may lead to either improved or deteriorating mental health; (2) consider individual characteristics and experiences prior to incarceration to identify vulnerable sub-groups of prisoners and (3) look at the relationship between mental health and engaging in institutional incidents such as rule breaking, assaulting other inmates or staff and self-injurious and suicidal behaviour.

Congratulations to Dr. Murray Weeks, whose first-author paper on the association between cognitive development in childhood and symptoms of anxiety/depression in adolescence was accepted for publication in the Journal of Affective Disorders. The paper showed that cognitive ability was generally protective against these symptoms at age 12-13, was associated with increased symptoms at age 14-15, and buffered the negative impact of chronic stressors. An early version of the paper can be found at http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0165032713006538.

For a short presentation on this project, please follow this link.

A recent APEAL Lab paper on suicide contagion in the CMAJ generated worldwide media attention. The paper, entitled “Association between exposure to suicide and suicidality outcomes in youth” caught the eye of CNN, CBS, CTV, CBC, The Globe and Mail, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, and many other outlets. The study showed that children who have a schoolmate die of suicide are much more likely to seriously consider suicide themselves. Congrats to Sonja Swanson, a Harvard doctoral student who visited the APEAL Lab in the summer of 2011, on a brilliant paper!

The APEAL Lab recently collaborated with Dr. Felice Jacka, based at Deakin University in Australia and an expert in the field examining diet and mental health, on a study examining the relationship between fruit and vegetable intake and mental health disorders in the Canadian population. This paper, entitled “The association between fruit and vegetable consumption and mental health disorders: Evidence from five waves of a national survey of Canadians” was recently published in the journal Preventive Medicine and found that greater fruit and vegetable intake was significantly associated with lower odds of depression.

The APEAL Lab is delighted to announce success in the September 2012 open operating grant competition of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, receiving $410,418 to support a project entitled “The burden of depression on mortality over six decades”. The project, which will be run in close collaboration with researchers at Harvard University, will involve linking members of the Stirling County Study to mortality data at Statistics Canada. The Stirling County Study is one of the oldest community surveys of the epidemiology of mental illness, dating back to 1952.