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Info on genetics and psychopathology

This section hosts general information on genetics and psychopathology, articles for parents, families and patients.

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Recent Blog posts

The CAPICE blog hosts news and announcements, events, media and articles, mostly written by the Early Stage Researchers (ESRs).

They will pursue the publication of articles about their research during their activities carried on within this project, and this blog will act as a travelogue to disseminate the research results to a broad audience of scientists, clinicians, patients and their parents and the general public.

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This article contains information on two posters. 1. "Phenome-wide association study of caffeine PRS and mental health outcomes across the lifespan using the ALSPAC pregnancy cohort", 2. "Maternal caffeine consumption during pregnancy and offspring cord blood DNA methylation" presented by Laura Schellhas, ESR in the CAPICE project, at the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) conference in Melbourne, Australia, 20-23 October, 2019. 

 

POSTER 1: "Phenome-wide association study of caffeine PRS and mental health outcomes across the lifespan using the ALSPAC pregnancy cohort"

Objectives
We applied a cross-generational approach to a phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) design to:
1) Investigate the intra-uterine effect of maternal smoking and caffeine consumption during pregnancy on offspring mental health outcomes
2) Explore whether the SNPs included in the polygenic risk score (PRS) for smoking initiation (SI) and coffee consumption show pleiotropic associations with mental health outcomes
3) Validate the PRS for SI and coffee consumption during pregnancy

Read more in the picture below.

 

POSTER 2: "Maternal caffeine consumption during pregnancy and offspring cord blood DNA methylation"

Background
• Based on animal experiments and observational studies, UK guidelines advise pregnant women to limit caffeine consumption to less than 200 mg per day
• There is little robust evidence of a causal intrauterine effect on offspring health in humans
• Identifying a biological mechanism through which intrauterine caffeine exposure might affect offspring outcomes would strengthen the causal evidence base
• Therefore, we investigated associations between intrauterine exposure to caffeine and genome-wide DNA methylation in human cord blood 

Read more in the picture below.

 

Project objectives


1. To clarify the role of genetic and environmental factors in the occurrence, course and comorbidity of mental health symptoms across childhood and adolescence..
2. To establish the overlap in genetic risk factors with other characteristics related to childhood mental health symptoms, such as adult mental disorders, IQ and brain structure.
3. To identify genetic (inherited), epigenetic (due to chemical changes to the DNA) and transcriptomic (related to gene expression) variation associated with the occurrence, course and co-morbidity of mental health symptoms during childhood and adolescence.
4. To identify biological pathways associated with mental health symptoms and to validate potential drug targets based on these pathways.
5. To build a prediction model that identifies groups of children that are at highest risk to develop chronic symptoms and that should be targeted for more intensive prevention or treatment programmes.
6. To further develop the already successful EAGLE (EArly Genetics and Lifecourse Epidemiology) consortium into a sustainable international network of researchers in which collaboration is facilitated by data harmonization and IT solutions. This will enable joint analysis of data over cohorts..
7. To build a structure to disseminate the results to a broad audience of scientists, clinicians, patients and their parents and the general public.

These ambitious objectives can be achieved by training of the ESRs in:
- childhood and adolescent mental health symptoms and their (chronic) altereffects (as a result of a non-complete recovery from the mental disorder);
- methods to analyze twin data as well as large-scale (epi)genetic and transcriptomic data across multiple cohorts;
- d
issemination of their results also through this website and its blog.

Get in Touch!

     

Contacts:
Prof. Christel Middeldorp, project coordinator

VU University Amsterdam
Dept. of Biological Psychology
email : c.m.middeldorp(at)vu.nl

Natascha Stroo, project manager
VU University Amsterdam
Dept. of Biological Psychology
email : natascha.stroo(at)vu.nl

Matteo Mauri, web & dissemination manager
University of Cagliari
email : matteo.mauri(at)diee.unica.it

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