AIMS

The epidemic of non-communicable diseases is challenging the health care system, has advanced into the focus of major medical journals and public health authorities worldwide, and The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently claimed to raise the priority accorded to non-communicable diseases. For example, it is cardiovascular diseases that are one of the leading non-communicable disease causes of premature morbidity and mortality worldwide and that will even remain among the three leading causes of burden of disease according to projections of mortality and burden of disease to 2030.

Likewise, respiratory diseases represent a major challenge for public health, as they have a huge economic impact and are highly prevalent both in developed and developing countries; it has been estimated that by 2025, an additional 100 million people will be suffering from asthma. Therefore, to improve urgently needed preventive approaches, the study of risk factors, including early-life influences, using prospective cohort studies has been identified as a grand challenge in chronic non-communicable diseases.

It has long been known that psychological factors have the potential to cause, influence, or exacerbate physical disease processes via their impact on biological function Among such psychological factors, the concept of school bullying has received growing attention as health risk factor in recent years. School bullying has been associated with an increased risk of psychological symptoms and psychopathologies, medication use, suicide and self-harm 17 18, and psychosomatic and physical complaints. Moreover, first evidence indicates that school bullying is associated with alterations in stress reactivity, and workplace-bullying victims may also have a higher risk of cardiovascular diseases.

However, the role of school bullying within the aetiology of chronic physical diseases has hardly been addressed to date. The World Health Organization has claimed to promote the understanding of the morbidity and mortality associated with bullying in order to give this psychosocial hazard a stronger level of worldwide public health attention and to improve action towards it. Therefore, in line with current strategic research goals targeting amongst others etiological factors of widespread diseases, the aim of the proposed study is to improve our understanding of the role of school bullying especially with regard to non-communicable physical diseases in childhood and adolescence, using well-established indicators of (i.e. peripheral biomarkers and data from clinical examinations) and questionnaire/interview information on physical diseases, with a special focus on cardiovascular and respiratory health. The major advantage of using data from the ALSPAC study is the opportunity to use longitudinal data based on a large sample of adolescents, including well-established biomarkers of and clinical information on cardiovascular and respiratory health, together with self-reports and external reports on physical health.