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.
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!
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.
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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.
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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…
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.
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.
 | Professor Jonathan Mill gave us an overview of the work from his work in both The University of Exeter and Kings College London. He presented evidence of the new emergence of epigenetics in relation to schizophrenia, highlighting that the gene regulation implicated in epigenetics changes at different points in one’s lifespan. He highlighted that there are critical periods in pre and perinatal period for epigenetic influences from diet, infection, medication, climate, hormones, psychosocial factors, radiation, toxins, drugs. In order to explore the full effects, research needs reflect an epidemiological design. Exciting research ahead! |
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.
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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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