Grant: Project Grant

Early adolescence is a period of dramatic physical, social and emotional changes. Given that half of mental disorders onset before the age of 14, this can also be a time when mental health concerns emerge. From early symptoms it can be difficult to predict what an individual's trajectory will look like. Research is needed to better understand trajectories of illness and recovery, and factors that can influence risk and resilience. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) can measure how brain function changes across adolescence. Specific fMRI features have been linked to overall risk for mental disorders, while other features fluctuate over time with changing symptoms. fMRI features also change with age across adolescence, meaning that for fMRI to be clinically useful, we need to differentiate typical developmental changes from changes related to mental illness. The goal of this study is to understand how different fMRI features change as the brain matures, and identify changes related to age, physical growth, puberty and mental health symptoms. To do this, we will take a highly individualized approach, so that we can decouple these factors in individuals. The first phase of our study will be to co-design parts of the study with a group of older adolescents/young adults who have lived experience of mental illness. This will help our team recruit and retain youth for an intensive longitudinal study and ensure that we are measuring factors that are relevant to early adolescent mental health. We will then recruit two groups of youth aged 8-12 years, one group with no current mental health concerns, and one group experiencing early symptoms. We will follow these youth quarterly over a period of three years, and collect precise measurements of their brain function, along with measures of physical changes and mental health. We will use these data to identify brain changes that relate to age, physical growth and pubertal changes, and early symptoms of mental illness.