Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Antipsychotic medications are known to put people at risk for weight gain, but these medications have not been well studied in young adults who are starting medication for the first time. As well, even before starting antipsychotic medications, young adults with mental illness demonstrate risk for weight gain due to their illness, but this is also understudied. Metabolomics is a new experimental technique for studying human diseases. It measures the concentrations of a large number of biological molecules (i.e. metabolites) that are present in our body at a given time. Metabolomics can be used to identify unique patterns of metabolites that youth with mental illness have, or unique changes in metabolite patterns that are caused by antipsychotics that put these individuals at risk for weight gain. We will use metabolomics to study metabolite patterns in the blood of patients who are just starting antipsychotics, and see how they differ with healthy participants. As well, we will see how metabolite patterns and body weight change over 12 weeks of antipsychotic treatment. Finally, we will see if there is a subgroup of patients who have unique metabolite patterns that put them at even greater risk for weight gain due to antipsychotics, compared to other patients. We predict that there will be differences in metabolite patterns between patients and healthy participants. As well, we think that antipsychotic treatment will cause changes in both metabolite patterns and body weight. Finally, we predict that there will be a unique metabolite pattern in patients who go on to develop more weight due to antipsychotic treatment than other patients. This study can help us better understand why patients requiring antipsychotic treatment are at risk for weight gain. In turn, this could help scientists find ways to reduce this risk.