After an enjoyable and interesting first day at the MQ Mental Health Science Meeting, the pPOD team were excited to see what the impressive line-up of day two would bring! 

Symposium 1
The first symposium of the day, chaired by Francesca Happé (King's College London) focused on developmental neurocognitive models. To begin, Edmund Sonuga-Barke (King's College London), gave a fascinating insight into extreme neuroplastic responses to extraordinary  environments, and their links to disorders of impulse and attention.

​ Most striking to us was Edmund’s recent findings from the English and Romanian Adoptee project which looks at the outcomes of children adopted into the UK from Romania in the early 1990s. Now young adults, the most recent follow-up indicated that whilst the Romanian children adopted after the age of 6-months have made great developmental improvements, they were still up to seven times more likely to meet the criteria for an ADHD diagnosis, compared to UK-born adoptees. Thus, these disorders can go beyond heritability when young children are exposed to these extraordinary environments.  The talk was concluded with an insight into prevention neuroscience and how early intervention can exploit neuroplasticity to create training effects. Alongside this, Prof. Sonuga-Barke emphasised the need for further study to fully understand the mechanisms by which neuroplasticity works when exposed to extraordinary  environments. 

Next, Frances Rice (Cardiff University) outlined her findings from the Early Prediction of Adolescent Depression (EPAD) study, which gave us insight into the cognitive mechanisms of change in adolescents before and after receiving preventive classroom-based interventions (e.g. CBT, CBT + behavioural activation, mindfulness based cognitive therapy). They found that those participants who received CBT + behavioural activation showed increases in reward seeking and a reduction in depressive symptoms, a finding not present in participants receiving the other therapies. This indicates that reward seeking behaviours may be a useful target for preventive psychological interventions.

To end the day’s first symposium, Graham Murray (University of Cambridge) discussed some developmental neurocognitive perspectives on ADHD and schizophrenia. Of particular interest was Graham’s outline of findings from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort study. In this research they followed up participants diagnosed with ADHD during adolescence, and examined their brain structure and memory function at age 20-24 years. Whilst only 10% of participants still met the diagnostic checklist criteria for an ADHD diagnosis, the researchers found that all participants with an ADHD diagnosis in adolescence had reduced grey matter in the caudate nucleus, with over 33% failing a memory test (compared to just 5% failure in the control group). These findings raise important questions surrounding tools used in the diagnosis of disorders such as ADHD.
 
Symposium 2
Next up was the second symposium of the day, chaired by Peter Jones (University of Cambridge) which looked to bring together talks focusing on risk factors for mental illness. First up was Jean-Baptiste Pingault (University College London) whose current work explores whether bullying victimisation is causal in poor mental health outcomes, or whether other genetic and environmental factors are at play. By using data from thousands of twin pairs in longitudinal twin studies, Jean-Baptiste’s work has been able to pinpoint victimisation as a causative factor in poor mental health outcomes, highlighting an important target for interventions. 

​Myrna Weissman  (Columbia University) then presented fascinating findings from a follow-up study which looks of the intergenerational transmission of depression. Looking across three generations, spanning thirty years and six waves of interviews, researchers found that young people who’d had a parent and grandparent diagnosed with a depression and/or anxiety disorder were three times more likely to receive a diagnosis themselves than participants without a family history of depression. Myrna stressed the necessity for researchers and clinicians to work together to break this cycle of transmission. 

​Panel Discussion
Following lunch was a panel discussion focusing on ‘What use is a diagnosis?’ with Sally McManus opening to provide insight into who is receiving a diagnosis, using data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey. 

The panel was chaired by Stuart Hughes (BBC news) and included Prof. Miranda Wolpert (UCL), Prof. Simon Wessely (King’s College London/Royal College of Psychiatrists), Megan Haste (The Mental Health Blogger) and Prof. Ezra Susser (Columbia University). The panel was incredibly interesting, with many insightful and complex discussions had, and showed the benefits of bringing together people from across disciplines, with varying views.

Keynote 3
Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg (Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim) brought a fantastic final day to a close with a talk on the social environment, its effects on the brain, and the development of mental health disorders. Andreas stressed the need to look to the environment, and how we can modify it, when thinking about preventing and treating mental disorders, such as schizophrenia. Andreas’ research has found that living in urban environments (city living), social status and migration are all factors which can alter the functioning of the amygdala and cingulate cortex, impairing an individual’s ability to deal with social stress. The focus on environmental factors impacting upon mental health drew together the complex effects of genetic and environmental factors we had heard about throughout the meeting. Currently, out of the two, environmental factors are the only influences which can be modified highlighting yet another important area of intervention.
 
The pPOD team were delighted to have been involved in such an enjoyable event and to have heard about the ground breaking and inspirational mental health research is taking place around the world! 

By Beth Barker and Emily Pearson

Today is the third annual MQ meeting. A group of pPODers came along and were excited to hear about MQ’s work and all of the exciting mental health research taking place across the world.
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Sophie Dix, Director of Research gave us a warm welcome, introducing us to MQs brilliant new “Swear campaign”, promoting the amazing plethora of work the charity are involved with, using research to break down barriers in mental health. At the heart of this was MQs multidisciplinary approach to taking on this challenge from all angles. Did you know that on average three children in every class have a diagnosable mental health disorder and only one in four of those are getting the help they need?
 
First up was Keynote speaker 1, Professor Louise Arseneault who shared with us her insightful work on the victims of bullying. Louise’s work focuses on the victims themselves rather that the perpetrator, finding that the victims may have certain characteristics that increase their likelihood of victimization such as maltreatment at home.  She also gave evidence from her extensive work using twins of the detrimental mental health effects of bullying, accounting for many confounds including previous mental. She even shared with us work showing bullying is even implicated in a poorly regulated immune system as well as a study showing emotional distress is associated with childhood bullying as late as till 55 years old!

Next was a symposium of anxiety and related behaviors, starting with Assistant Professor Susanna Ahmari (University of Pittsburgh) guiding us through new technology being used to discover brain correlates of repetitive thoughts within OCD. Using mouse models Susanna explained how her team was able to increase obsessive grooming in mice by optogenetically stimulating connections between the Orbitofrontal Cortex and Striatum. This increased grooming persisted after stimulation and increased brain plasticity in parallel. A very exciting finding as Deep brain stimulation to the Ventromedial area currently used to reach deep brain areas to the same effect of increased plasticity may be able to be applied non-invasively using Transcranial magnetic stimulation.
 

​Professor Hugo Critchley from the University of Sussex, showed us his novel research that uses participant’s accuracy of their own heart beat rate timing to measure interoception. Following on from work suggesting that those with conditions such as anxiety may show more discrepancy between there subjective perception and objective heartbeat he has developed therapy’s to alleviate anxiety by teaching individuals to be more accurately aware of their own bodily states, a simple but brilliantly promising therapy.

Professor Michelle Moulds (University of New South Wales) was the last speaker on this symposium. Both from work in the UK and in Australia, she has developed an innovative new transdiagnositic approach to treating repetitive thoughts within depression and anxiety, arguing that these presentations show more similarities than differences between diagnoses. From this she has developed a non-diagnosis specific measure of repetitive thoughts that cuts across disorders. Her work brings about interesting questions of the commonalities between disorders and the causes of comorbidities. Much of this will I’m sure be discussed in tomorrow’s Panel discussion “what use is a diagnosis?”, watch this space…
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After a brilliant lunch we reconvened with symposium 2 on early mechanisms of mental illness. Professor Ezra Susser kicked us of with the effects of prenatal micronutrients. He presented studies on the effects of micronutrients prenatally and their relation to schizophrenia in later life, including naturalistic examples from Dutch and Chinese samples. However Susser noted that generally we do not have large enough of long enough randomized controlled trials to infer causality largely due to the difficulty of experimenting using pregnant women. Susser also stressed the importance of viewing translational science not as a linear process from basic science clinical application then implementation but rather a dynamic process where each process learns from the other. He also noted that this time of globalization was one to branch out and share knowledge- something I hope we are all contributing to over these two days!
 
Professor Beatrice Rico added to the debate by discussion of inhibitory circuitries related to schizophrenia. She discussed the role of altered GABA signaling in schizophrenia and her work on interneurons ran from her lab at Kings College London.
 

Last but not least Professor Carmen Sandi (The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) closed with her work into the (plasticity coding) STX gene in mice. Fascinatingly STX knockout mice show reduced plasticity in the amygdala, inhibiting their freezing conditioning response. Using this finding Carmen’s team are attempting to use this as a mouse model of psychopathology, as the mice show such an increase of pathological aggression to not only their competitor males, but also to female mates and juveniles. This is important to think about how these findings are modeled onto humans and perhaps an indicator as to how this aggression can inform cycles of interpersonal violence. A final interesting observation of the purposely-bred mice was that the social hierarchy in place could vulnerability and responses to stimuli with mice with a lower social status having poorer outcomes.
 
 

Overall a fascinating and inspiring talk had by all the pPod team, with lots of food for thought! The day ended with linking in with colleagues and a huge display of posters, with Emily representing the Healthy Start, Happy Start study. Roll on day 2…..
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Blog written by Ruby and Rachael