Hello Andrew, could you tell us what your role is and what sorts of things you do?
I’m the work package lead for dissemination, communication, exploitation and public outreach on CoMorMent. I co-Chair the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium’s Major Depressive Disorder Working Group, and I am a principal or co-investigator on several cohort studies, including Generation Scotland.
What is it about the genetics of mental health that particularly interests you?
Genetic approaches to studying mental health are uniquely objective, quantifiable, and closely linked to the aetiology and mechanisms of clinical disorders. Genetics also provide us with the tools to identify what is a cause, a causal consequence or merely a correlation with a disorder or its management. These strengths, combined with rapid methodological advances and new sample collections make genetics the most promising way to improve our understanding and treatment of people with mental illness.
What are cohorts and why are they important for research, especially CoMorMent research?
Cohorts are studies of specific groups of people assessed on two or more occasions over time. They might include genetic sample collections and repeated interviews or questionnaire assessments spaced out over many years. Others include biological measurements such as repeated brain scans or involve family members.
Cohorts are very valuable for research because they help us to understand what is going on across the lifespan, before and after the onset of illness, instead of simply taking a snapshot of people’s health at one point in time.
In CoMorMent, we are using cohorts to help us understand how important genetics and environmental risk factors really are in determining someone’s risk of mental disorder and one of its most severe complications – cardiovascular disease. Our aim is to develop an improved understanding so that in future we can reduce risk or more effectively treat people with mental disorder, especially those with or at risk of stroke and heart problems.
What sorts of “real world” benefits can cohort research provide for mental health?
Not everyone with mental illness benefits from medication, and often people go through a process of trial and error to find a medication that suits them. So far it has been difficult to predict the medication that people will respond to, but this is an area where CoMorMent can help.
CoMorMent brings together multiple large European studies and cohorts to produce a sample of 1.8 million people. This gives us the data, tools and expertise to start examining which medications work best for whom. It also enables us to better understand the risk factors and mechanisms of mental illness, and why people with mental illness develop cardiovascular disease more often than people who are unaffected. We hope to use these findings to better predict the onset of mental illness and its complications earlier in future, and mitigate the lifelong suffering and mortality associated with these conditions.
Do you have a message for anyone who wants to know more about CoMorMent?
CoMorMent is an exciting multi-centre European project that uses data from existing cohorts to discover the reciprocal connections between mental and physical health. We will have lots of new findings to share over the next few years and you can be one of the first to hear about our discoveries. Sign up to receive future newsletters or follow us on Twitter @CoMorMent to stay up to date with this exciting project!
