Dr Erin Dunn runs The Dunn Lab to help us understand the risks and causes of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety.  Her focus is on women, children and teenagers and she has been using questionnaire and clinical data from Children of the 90s for many years. 

For Mental Health Awareness Week she writes for us about her most recent paper:

“The availability of comprehensive and repeated measures in Children of the 90s has allowed us to ask and answer a number of questions that have clear clinical impact and policy implications.  

 “My research group studies mental disorders, including depression, and anxiety, which are highly prevalent, affecting an estimated 1.1 billion people around the world. These disorders have remained leading causes of disability worldwide for the past 30 years, with depression projected to be the leading cause of disability by 2030. Using data from Children of the 90s, we have been focusing on trying to identify opportunities for prevention of these burdensome disorders.  We have been identifying individuals most at risk for mental disorders (whom to intervene), understanding the mechanisms underlying mental disorder risk (how to intervene), and determining when during the course of development are people most vulnerable (when to intervene). 

 “A recent analysis we completed, for example, examined the relationship between exposure to different types of childhood adversity and epigenetic marks.  Epigenetic marks are chemical tags that get added to the DNA sequence and determine the extent to which the genes in that DNA sequence are expressed.  The comprehensiveness of measures in Children of the 90s allowed us to study a range of childhood adversities, including experiencing poverty, being maltreated by parents, and growing-up in an unsafe neighbourhood. 

 “We found that childhood adversity was associated with the patterning of these epigenetic marks, but this relationship was not simply due to the presence versus absence of exposure.  Rather, the most important factor was when the adversity occurred, with the period from birth to age three emerging as a time period when exposure to adversity was associated with more changes in these epigenetic marks.

 “These findings are important because they suggest that the first two years of life may be an especially important time period for shaping biological processes that ultimately give rise to mental health conditions.  If these results replicate, they suggest that it may be more important to prioritize policies and interventions targeting children who experienced adversity before age three, as a means to prevent long-term risk for mental health problems like depression.”