The NIMH team has collaborated with the U PENN team on assessment and data analysis of emotional and behavioral conditions in children enrolled in the Neurodevelopmental Genomics Study. During the past year, the NIMH team has collaborated with the U PENN and CHOP investigators to facilitate data analysis and manuscript preparation. We completed and submitted one manuscript focused on medical and psychiatric comorbidity in the sample, and another manuscript describing the identification of youth at risk for psychotic spectrum symptoms. In addition, we recently submitted a manuscript describing the study methodology, and have continued to work with collaborators at the Broad Institute to examine the heritability of behavioral phenotypes in the study. Cross validation of this assessment with more extensive diagnostic interviews at the NIMH site is now underway. We have been developing a collaboration to follow 300 youth between the ages of 15 and 25 years who show or are at risk for mood spectrum disorders, acquiring measures of activity, experiential momentary sampling, olfaction, neurocognition, and clinical symptom measures. Public Health Impact: This report on physical and mental comorbidity is the first study to investigate the specificity of associations between a broad range of physical and mental conditions using a large, systematically obtained pediatric sample with enriched information from electronic medical records and direct interviews. The findings highlight the importance of capturing the roots of both physical and mental disorders in childhood in order to trace their evolution into chronic diseases causing major public health concerns. Information generated from such a sample may have profound impact on the current clinical practices. The proposed comprehensive phenotyping will benefit medicine across diseases and include neurobehavioral measures, which will help elucidate both specific effects of neuropsychiatric disorders and the impact of other medical disorders on brain function. Future Plans: The NIMH team will continue to work with the U PENN and CHOP collaborators to conceptualize and analyze the data, and prepare manuscripts for publication. The NIMH team will focus on the medical-psychiatric comorbidity, environmental/neighborhood risk factors of mental disorders, and dimensional measures of psychopathology in the dataset. In addition, the NIMH will collaborate with U PENN to acquire data on the 300 youth who show or are at risk for mood spectrum disorders and implement clinical and biomarkers for mood disorders that have been identified in the NIMH Family Study of Affective Spectrum Disorders.
| Paksarian, Diana; Merikangas, Kathleen R; Calkins, Monica E et al. (2016) Racial-ethnic disparities in empirically-derived subtypes of subclinical psychosis among a U.S. sample of youths. Schizophr Res 170:205-10 |
| Calkins, Monica E; Merikangas, Kathleen R; Moore, Tyler M et al. (2015) The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort: constructing a deep phenotyping collaborative. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 56:1356-1369 |
| Merikangas, Kathleen R; Calkins, Monica E; Burstein, Marcy et al. (2015) Comorbidity of physical and mental disorders in the neurodevelopmental genomics cohort study. Pediatrics 135:e927-38 |
| Robinson, E B; Kirby, A; Ruparel, K et al. (2015) The genetic architecture of pediatric cognitive abilities in the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort. Mol Psychiatry 20:454-8 |
| Calkins, Monica E; Moore, Tyler M; Merikangas, Kathleen R et al. (2014) The psychosis spectrum in a young U.S. community sample: findings from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort. World Psychiatry 13:296-305 |
