Many adults in the United Kingdom suffer from psychological distress. Psychological distress can range from worrying a lot, to feeling down, to even more serious problems. Importantly, existing research suggests that adults with psychological difficulties often also have behavioural problems as children. Understanding how psychological distress develops is a crucial first step in helping us (i) identify which children are most at risk and (ii) develop targeted strategies to prevent or manage such problems. The reasoning here is that if we can prevent the development of psychological distress in childhood, these children will be less likely to show psychological distress as adults.

We already know that children who show conduct problems (e.g. fighting, lying, stealing) tend to come from riskier circumstances. For example, these children can have mothers with psychological difficulties. Moreover, mothers that have psychological difficulties tend to live in deprived neighbourhoods (e.g. poverty, crime, pollution, low access to greenspace such as parks with trees and grass). Here, the idea is that neighbourhood deprivation can associate with maternal psychological difficulties and family dysfunction, which in turn, can lead to less consistent, stimulating and more punitive parenting behaviours, and poorer child behavioural outcomes. However, characteristic of the parent(s), such as education, employment and psychological distress can play a role in the type of neighbourhood a child grows up in. These characteristics can also affect how vulnerable a parent is to stress-inducing features of the neighbourhood, and therefore could potentially affect the type of parenting used on a child.

During adolescence, youth spend less time with their families and more time “hanging out” with their peer groups (or friends). Therefore, youth are more directly exposed to the neighbourhood, including both structural (e.g. poverty, pollution, distance from green space) and social (crime and deviant peers) deprivation factors. Similar to the mothers, individual characteristics of a teenager can increase the likelihood that individual will be exposed to risk factors in the neighbourhood. Here, impulsivity (i.e., acting without thinking, thrill seeking) can influence the type of social environments for which an adolescent actively seeks out. Indeed, high impulsivity can lead to affiliation with other teenagers who are engaging in delinquent behaviours (e.g. fighting, lying, stealing), which in turn, can increase a teenager’s substance use, unsafe sexual activity and criminal behaviours. Thus, during adolescence, the individual characteristics of youth may associate with risk-related behaviours within the neighbourhood context.

To date, however, existing studies have not teased out the specific biological mechanisms that could explain how neighbourhood deprivation might relate to punitive parenting for the mother, or to a teenager “hanging” out with a deviant peer group. One potentially important biological factor of this kind is a ‘polygenic score’. A polygenic score gives you a genetic risk for some type of trait (e.g. depression, thrill seeking) or disease (e.g. cancer). These scores are based very large studies, sometimes over 1 million people, that show associations between traits or disease with genetic variants across the entire known genome. These different variants and then summed into a single “polygenic score” in smaller, independent studies.

In this study we plan to address two key potential limitations of existing research: (1) Existing studies have not examined how maternal polygenic risk for depression can affect harsh parenting and child conduct problems, particularly if living within high neighbourhood deprivation. (2) Existing studies have not assessed adolescent polygenic risk for externalising problems and impulsivity (e.g. ADHD, sensation seeking) associates with higher affiliation deviant peer affiliation, particularly if living within high neighbourhood deprivation.

This study will address each of these main limitations of the existing research. We are ideally placed to achieve these aims as we have access to psychological, parenting, behavioural, friendship and genetic data already collected from two very large scale samples of children, extensively studied from childhood and into adolescence (The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, in Southwest England and Generation R, Rotterdam, The Netherlands).

We hope that results from this research will help answer questions around why some caregivers are more likely to use punitive parenting, and why children are more likely to have conduct problems, and guide early intervention for high-risk children who may be prone to impulsive and thrill seeking behaviours.

Since the 1980s overweight and obesity have increased dramatically, but we do not know if this has altered their health and social consequences for individuals. In high-income countries, inequalities in underweight is largely ignored, but my research on body weight and unemployment suggests they are greater than realised. Weight misperception (failure to recognise one’s overweight/obesity) has increased, but the implications for individual health and health inequalities are unclear. 

Using UK and Norwegian data from 1984-2021, I will: 

Extend knowledge of economic inequalities in underweight in adults and children  

Investigate influence of overweight/obesity on depression, depression on overweight/obesity, and whether relationships have changed with time 

Investigate consequences of weight misperception for weight, mental health, and health inequalities 

Results will identify high-risk groups for underweight and illuminate causes, explore societal factors modifying body weight-depression links, indicate mental health returns to tackling obesity, and inform effective weight management strategies which also support wellbeing.

As we go into our next funding period we are thinking about how we can collect data efficiently and to help develop the best strategy to ensure that as many participants respond to our questionnaires and attend clinics as possible. We would like to include some questions in the next questionnaire to the original study children (and ideally their parents as well) in order to help develop that strategy. We will also gather some basic sociodemographic information to determine whether there are any differences in responses. This will help us to determine whether we should target particular groups of the population in different ways. We would also like to randomise participants to receive the Q completion incentive as they do now (i.e. automatically) or opt-in (i.e. incentive is sent on request)

Understanding mental illness is key to ensuring individuals remain mentally healthy across the life course. This study aims to explore the genetic and environmental factors underlying the mental health of victims of bullying. Individuals subjected to bullying are at a greater risk of later mental health issues. Our study will consider whether an increased genetic risk to depression influences the impact of adolescent bullying on later mental health. We will use available data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on depression to construct polygenic scores. These scores will be used to predict the mental health of victims following adolescent bullying, allowing us to test whether polygenic scores can discriminate the resilient from the non-resilient. Investigating why some people may avoid mental health problems after experiences of bullying could hold important implications for the prevention and treatment of victimisation and depression.

Five percent of school age children have developmental coordination disorder (DCD). People with DCD find tasks such as throwing a ball, writing, or brushing their teeth extremely difficult, and are more likely to struggle academically even though they are just as smart. Despite being extremely common, we understand little of why some children get DCD.
We know that sometimes DCD can run in families but we don't understand the causes of this. This study will be the first to look for these inherited causes. We will use genetic data from the ALSPAC cohort to find genes that are underlying DCD. This will help us to understand how these genes affect the pathways that are required in a developing brain.
We will also use this genetic information to help us understand why some children go on to develop other difficulties like ADHD or language problems, whereas other children do not. We can look into how these behaviours interact with the movement and planning difficulties seen in DCD, and whether they are important in the development of these behaviours in typically developing children.

This study examines attitudes of participants who have taken part in health research studies towards data sharing. Data sharing refers to researchers sharing study data at the end of a study with other researchers for further research.
I have designed a questionnaire to capture participant attitudes, drawing on questions asked in previous research (outwith the UK) on this topic.
Little research has been conducted exploring the attitudes of study participants to this sharing of their data and what limited findings there are, largely relate to settings outside of the UK. Although participants may give their consent for their data to be shared when they join a research study, they may not fully understand what this means.
By asking study participants to complete a questionnaire about data sharing we can find out what their attitudes towards it are.
The survey will be distributed to as wide a variety of participants as possible (both in terms of location and type of study they
took part in). This increases the generalisability of the results- they are more likely to apply to the wider population.
It is hoped that the data collected in the survey will show what participants attitudes are likely to be- how they would prefer to
consent to data sharing, how much information about it they would like at the beginning of a study and if they have any
concerns about the concept and processes. This information could then be used by researchers to modify the consent process, the way in which data sharing is explained to participants or the way in which data is shared.

While many genetic loci are known to be associated with adult areal bone mineral density (aBMD), less is known about genetic determinants of bone accrual. Our aims is to replicate in ALSPAC novel genome-wide associations with bone accrual in the Bone Mineral Density in Childhood Study.

This project will establish a network in which social scientists, geneticists and epidemiologists work together to better understand, and benefit from, longitudinal birth cohort studies, which follow participants throughout their lives, often including multiple generations. These studies are becoming more important in disease research, to understand how environmental factors affect our health. So far, social scientists have not played a prominent role in the design or implementation of this type of study. The input of social scientists is important to better understand the relationship between biology and society emerging from birth cohort studies. This project will fill this gap by creating a network of scientists from all disciplines, including the social sciences. The project will include longitudinal birth cohort studies in the Global North and also in the Global South, where little research has been carried out on how these studies work, how they are maintained and used.