The collection of data from this cohort has now been completed and analyses of the data are now underway. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Family Study of Affective Spectrum Disorders has included numerous comparable measures of psychiatric and cardiovascular phenotypes that can be analyzed to develop hypotheses for COLAUS and conversely. The first report of the findings from this study has recently been submitted for publication (Glaus et al, under review). In the past year, we have been working on a set of parallel papers on the familial aggregation of mania and major depression. These papers are now in their final stage and will be submitted together soon. Public Health Impact: Cardiovascular diseases, their well-established risk factors and mental disorders have the greatest public health impact of all chronic non-infectious human diseases (Vandeleur et al, in press). Moreover, a recent World Health Organization (WHO) projection of future population health concluded that by 2030, unipolar depressive disorders and ischemic heart disease (IHD) will be among the three leading causes of disease burden worldwide. Given the major public health impact of both CVD/CVRF and mental disorders, the study of the mechanisms underlying their associations is of high clinical and scientific relevance. Future Plans: The next phase of this project involves analysis of the biomarker and clinical data in the Lausanne site. We then plan to integrate the family study data and common biomarkers from the NIMH Family Study with those of the COLAUS Study to enhance analytic power and to cross-replicate the findings. COLAUS is further planning on implementing EMA and Actigraphy in their study. We will be helping to do this and will do combined analyses of these data in the future. Two chief goals in this next phase will be to: 1) implement mobile technologies developed in our studies at NIMH IRP and 2) conduct joint analyzes of NIMH Family Study adults and children. The results will then be used to guide plans for future follow-up and extension of the study samples.
