ADHD, Author Interviews, Depression, Education, JAMA, Mental Health Research, Pediatrics / 25.09.2019
Younger Children in Same School Year More Likely To Be Diagnosed with Depression, ADHD and Intellectual Disability
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
[caption id="attachment_51452" align="alignleft" width="200"] Jeremy Brown[/caption]
Jeremy Brown BA MSc
RESEARCH DEGREE STUDENT IN PHARMACOEPIDEMIOLOGY
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Given the way schools typically work, children in the same year as each other can be almost a whole year apart in terms of age. We’ve known for a while that children who are young in their year at school are also more likely to be diagnosed as having hyperactivity disorders and tend to do less well academically than the older children in the year. They also seem to be at increased risk of suicide. This is thankfully an extremely rare occurrence in children, but there is little evidence about whether younger children are more likely to be diagnosed with depression.
We used electronic health records for just over a million children in the UK to see if there was any association between how old the children were in their year and whether they got diagnosed with ADHD, intellectual disability and depression.
Jeremy Brown[/caption]
Jeremy Brown BA MSc
RESEARCH DEGREE STUDENT IN PHARMACOEPIDEMIOLOGY
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Given the way schools typically work, children in the same year as each other can be almost a whole year apart in terms of age. We’ve known for a while that children who are young in their year at school are also more likely to be diagnosed as having hyperactivity disorders and tend to do less well academically than the older children in the year. They also seem to be at increased risk of suicide. This is thankfully an extremely rare occurrence in children, but there is little evidence about whether younger children are more likely to be diagnosed with depression.
We used electronic health records for just over a million children in the UK to see if there was any association between how old the children were in their year and whether they got diagnosed with ADHD, intellectual disability and depression.
Dr. Hui Wang[/caption]
Prof Hui Wang PhD
Wuhan University
China
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: We started our work in the adverse outcome of maternal caffeine intake during pregnancy about 15 years ago. Then, we found that prenatal caffeine intake could result in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in the offspring. However, the underlying mechanism was unclear.
So, we start the current work, and found that hat maternal caffeine intake disrupts liver development before and after birth, which might be the trigger of the adult non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in the offspring rats. Moreover, we further found that the fetal programming of liver glucocorticoid – insulin like growth factor 1 axis, a new endocrine axis first reported by our team, might participate in such process.
