Depression has become a common mental illness, and It is crucial to establish and study depressive symptoms through early adolescence across adolescence to early adulthood. It is vital to characterize specific causes and certain types of depression in populations to help identify critical points for intervention and treatment. Studies on Depressogenic thinking (i.e., negative cognitive styles) in early adolescence suggest there is an association with the development of depressive mood in this age group. However, the long-lasting effect of depressogenic thinking is not known, especially in early adulthood or later ages. This project will examine how different profiles of depressogenic thinking are associated with varying types of depression and depressive mood (e.g., irritability, anhedonia, depressive thoughts, fatigue or sleeping) and identify the mechanisms underlying negative thoughts (styles) and later depression. Although CBT and medication are used in treatment for diagnosed cases of depression, this study may potentially develop early intervention strategies that may target early adolescence to improve depressogenic thinking to prevent depression in early adulthood and beyond.

Improving the mental health of children and young people is a national priority in the UK. The rate of self-harm amongst adolescents ranges from 6.9 to 18.8 % in the UK. Schools can provide an environment that encourages positive mental health at an early age and prevents poor mental health in later years. Positive relationships with peers and positive perceptions of school connectedness (that is, adolescents’ sense of belonging and attachment to school) are associated with increases in adolescents’ psychosocial wellbeing and decreases in the number of mental health issues. School absenteeism is also associated with an increased risk of self-harm. Levels of school absenteeism may be reduced if early school experiences are of a positive nature. There is also an association of suicidal and non-suicidal self-harm with adverse experiences at school and even minor events like not enjoying school or class work and the feeling about teachers being unclear with respect to their behaviour. We will investigate if early school experiences are associated with adolescent self-harm in the ALSPAC cohort.

The Covid-19 lockdown has shone a light on the importance of where we live for our health and wellbeing. Living in the countryside; having a garden; living in a cohesive neighbourhood; being within walking distance of a park: these factors create very different lockdown experiences, even between neighbours living a stone’s throw apart.

Research into neighbourhood factors and mental health is not new. However, lockdown has created a natural experiment in which people’s activities outside the home are largely being confined to their immediate neighbourhoods. Lockdown has thus amplified the potential detrimental – and protective – effects of neighbourhood conditions on our mental health. Investigating this relationship is not simple. It is important to take into consideration potential factors that might confound associations (e.g., prior mental health). It is also important to take into consideration how individual-level factors such as housing type might modify any associations of neighbourhood characteristics with mental health.

The current project will explore the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics during lockdown – including population density, greenspace, deprivation, and social fragmentation – and people’s symptoms of anxiety and depression during and after lockdown. Analyses will control for key confounders of the association. Moderation of associations according to household composition, housing type, garden access, and perceived access to nature will be explored.

Whilst it is established that children of lower socioeconomic position (SEP) generally have worse mental health outcomes, most existing research is cross-sectional. Longitudinal studies are important for understanding when inequalities first emerge and the course they take (e.g. stable, widening or decreasing). Whilst longitudinal approaches are now commonly used to model inequalities in height and weight they have rarely been used for mental health outcomes. The aim of this project is use data from multiple EU studies to describe how inequalities in key mental health and cognitive outcomes emerge across childhood.

The aim of this project is to investigate the effect of socioeconomic position on trajectories of key mental health and cognitive outcomes across childhood. It will also serve as a ‘proof of concept’ for using DataSHIELD to conduct multilevel analyses. Our specific aims are to (1) to identify the age at which inequalities emerge for different mental health outcomes, and (2) to describe whether inequalities decrease, remain stable, or widen over time.

There is currently a pandemic of a new disease, COVID19, which is caused by a virus called SARS-CoV-2.

Asthma, eczema and hay fever and are common diseases in childhood and responsible for a significant burden on families and health services. Atopic eczema, hay fever (allergic rhinitis) and atopic asthma often co-exist. Early diagnosis and appropriate management can reduce progression and severity of these diseases.
The Born in Bradford (BiB) birth cohort includes over 13,500 children born between 2007 and 2011, with around half born to women of Pakistani ethnicity. Linked primary care and hospital admission data are available for 97% of BiB children. Two sub-studies within BiB, the Allergy and Infection Study (ALL IN, n=2559) and Mechanisms of the Development of ALLergy (MeDALL, n=1814), have collected detailed parental questionnaire data at age 1 and 2 years (ALL IN) and at 4 years (MeDALL). The current data collection phase for the whole BiB cohort, Growing Up, at ages 7-11 years is ongoing and also includes questions on these outcomes.
The BiB data provide an opportunity to investigate trajectories of allergic disease and asthma through childhood, by ethnic group. The linked primary care and hospital electronic health records (EHR) will contribute a wealth of data which can be analysed with machine learning methods. There is uncertainty over the validity of routine data but the extensive BiB questionnaire data at different ages provide a rare opportunity to test this.
The aims of this proposed study are:
1) to link research and routine data to explore early life and childhood longitudinal trajectories and describe clinical phenotypes of asthma, eczema and hay fever;
2) to investigate ethnic inequalities in access to care and presentation of these diseases
3) to investigate early life risk factors for these diseases
Questionnaire data are available from the BiB ALL IN sub-study at age 1 year, including questions on pets, family history of asthma/eczema/hay fever, housing conditions (damp, heating, flooring, bedding etc.), and at 2 years (as for age 1 plus eczema, hay fever, food allergy). Detailed data relevant to asthma, eczema and hay fever are available for the MeDALL sub-study participants at 4 years, including skin prick testing for 2269.
BiB receive regular extracts of primary care EHR data on diagnoses and prescriptions for BiB children, which will be linked to the BiB maternal baseline questionnaire data, including socio-demographic and household characteristics. Linked hospital admissions data are available from the Bradford Royal Infirmary. We will also compare EHR data and questionnaire data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC).
Latent class analysis or other cluster methods, such as k-means clustering, will be used to identify clinical phenotypes of asthma, eczema and hay fever. Longitudinal extensions of these cluster methods will be used to describe trajectories over age.
This study will provide important data on the validity of routine primary care EHR for asthma and allergic diseases, which is relevant as EHR are increasingly used for research studies. The comparison of questionnaire and EHR data will indicate whether there are ethnic differences in access to primary care for these diseases. Identification of clinical phenotypes of asthma, eczema and hay fever will inform appropriate treatment and management and the identification of factors associated with disease progression or severity could indicate potential prevention strategies.

Better Care South-West Partnership is a collaboration of NHS commissioners, primary, secondary, community and mental health care providers, local authorities, and academia. They look to address real-world health problems using the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) Systemwide health and social care dataset and have an ambition to use individual-level, linked routine care and administrative data to deliver a learning, Integrated Care System for the local population.
The Partnership represents a step change in using advanced analytics to deliver Better Care Loops across a care system and benefit patients and partner organisations. Its results will be scalable across the region and nationally.
Research Projects
· P-NEWS: personalised early warning scores for preventing unplanned critical care admission
· Precision antimicrobial prescribing: safeguarding patient outcomes and preserving future efficacy
· Using operation research methods to improve flow between acute and social care: modelling the responsiveness of system-level expenditure to changes in social care capacity
· Improving hospital efficiency by forecasting demand for hospital beds
· Underpinning infrastructure to the BNSSG Systemwide dataset

Vascular diseases such as hypertension, migraine, and atherosclerosis (hardening of arteries) involve changes in vascular cell function with reduced ability to contract and relax in response to different stresses. This results in chronic alterations in artery blood flow and maladaptive structural changes to the vascular wall leading to injury, tissue damage, and increased risk for life-threatening diseases such as stroke and heart attacks. Given that naturally occurring genetic variation contributes to changes in vascular function along with environmental risk from early life stages, it is now critical to evaluate the effects of these genetic associations at this stage using more systematic approaches. We plan to integrate these vascular phenotype data with high resolution molecular data to better understand how these genetic risk factors impact vascular disease risk at an early age.

The impact of the public health measures adopted to control the COVID-19 pandemic on young infants and family interactions is unknown. New information is vital to inform future policies and recovery for families and aid infant development. Infants may show more unsettled and
restless behaviours even if they are not aware of the situation, however, they may also show positive behaviours benefiting from more parental attention if parents are home. Understanding of both is important to manage further transitions in an ever changing home environment. Furthermore , young children will have been separated from wider family and friends. Online chats may provide a helpful substitute to retain attachments, but how young infants respond to such interactions is unknown . Using our existing methods to code indepeth parent and infant verbal and non-verbal behaviours we can compare parent and infant behaviours in interactions at this time to already collected and coded interactions of ALSPAC-G2 families pre-pandemic. We can also compare infant behaviours towards parents in the same room and a mimicked online interaction (where the one parent joins a chat from another room).